Your answer to 1 sounds like the answer they want to hear, but note that aN^2 is the cost per person, not of the whole city. Your explanation justifies a cost o

Your answer to 1 sounds like the answer they want to hear, but note that aN^2 is the cost per person, not of the whole city. Your explanation justifies a cost of aN per person. The question is also really vague, I hate questions where you don't find the correct answer, but rather try to infer what the teacher wants to hear. In a real city the costs per person are obviously not aN and certainly not aN^2 because the number of people that you have to meet does not scale linearly with the amount of people in the city. That would imply that if people in a village of 1000 people have a total meeting cost of $10 per person, then the people in new york have a total meeting cost of $80,000 per person. That's obviously ridiculous. Their aN^2 would imply that the total meeting cost in new york is $640,000,000 per person which is beyond ridiculous.