Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2025/paper-2/8/a/solution

For the first Cayley table, associativity fails: , whereas . It therefore does not define a group.
For the second table, assign the residues to , respectively. Every table entry agrees with addition modulo an integer modulo five. Thus this table defines the cyclic group of order five, with identity and inverses , . The identification with a known group verifies associativity as well as closure and the inverse axioms; inspecting only the identity row and inverses would not suffice.

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