IB skill practice

Use travelling salesperson bounds

Calculate and interpret lower or upper bounds for route-planning networks.

Paper 1, Paper 2 5 marks Difficulty 5

Use travelling salesperson bounds - interpretation demand

For a regional clinic travelling-salesperson lower-bound check, deleting one vertex leaves an MST of weight 31. The two smallest edges incident to the deleted vertex have total 8. Find the lower bound. This version asks for the same mathematical quantity after confirming the method from the context. Enter the requested value and choose the interpretation that matches the result.

Worked practice: result and interpretation

Calculate the requested result first, then choose the interpretation that follows from it.