Maths Olympiad Prep

Track / Stage 3 / 5 of 260 #5 of 1964

Problem 5

AMC 10/12, early questions
Number theory Difficulty 3.0 Multiple choice

Which of the following could not be the units digit [ones digit] of the square of a whole number?

Pick one

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Official solution

We see that 12=11^2=1, 22=42^2=4, 52=255^2=25, and 42=164^2=16, so already we know that either E\text{E} is the answer or the problem has some issues.
For integers, only the units digit affects the units digit of the final result, so we only need to test the squares of the integers from 00 through 99 inclusive. Testing shows that 88 is unachievable, so the answer is E\boxed{\text{E}}.

Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty, ordering) added by this project.