Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 1 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge / 2025 / Paper 2 / 3

Move the right-hand side to the left. The resulting homogeneous linear system has coefficient matrixA nonzero solution exists exactly when its determinant vanishes:Here the upper-left entry of the original matrix is $-1$, as verified in the original PDF; that entry is corrupted in the local OCR.

The determinant condition reduces to $3-2b=0$, givingAs a check, the first linear equation gives $y=2x$, and at this value of $b$ the second linear equation is satisfied for every such pair, including nonzero pairs.