Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2005/iii/paper-18/4/i/solution

Let be the Serre fibration. For , cover the base by and a small open ball about . Write and . The contractible-base assumption gives and identifies the pair , up to fiberwise homotopy, with .
Excision for the open cover gives . The relative base pair has
by the deformation retraction of the punctured ball onto and its relative homology sequence. The relative Künneth theorem therefore gives
There is no Tor term because the only nonzero base group is free. The long exact sequence of a pair, replacing by its homotopy-equivalent fiber, now becomes
The last arrow is the relative boundary transported through these identifications; it can encode twisting, so it has not been set to zero. This proves the relative homology of a fibration over a sphere sequence. In the dimension-zero case, the total space is the disjoint union of the two fibers and the same formula is the split sequence for that union.

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