Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2018/paper-1/13/d/solution

For real solutions with , the square root requires . First retain the solution , which would be lost by dividing by a square root of .
For , use the homogeneous first-order differential equation substitution , so , and . The equation becomes
This is now a separable differential equation. Integration gives . Since , the positive solutions satisfy
The implicit family is sufficient here because only parts (a) and (b) request an explicit expression. It also shows why the nonnegative choice of matters: denotes the positive square root.

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