Question

Together with some anthropologists, you’re studying a sparsely populated region of a rainforest, where 50 farmers live along a 50-mile-long stretch of river. Each farmer lives on a tract of land that occupies a 1-mile stretch of the river bank, so their tracts exactly divide up the 50 miles of river bank that they collectively cover. (The numbers are chosen to be simple and to make the story easy to describe.)

The farmers all know each other, and after interviewing them, you’ve discovered that each farmer is friends with all the other farmers that live at most 20 miles from him or her, and is enemies with all the farmers that live more than 20 miles from him or her.

Answer 1

Step-by-step explanation:

Farmers are always both directly and indirectly connected to each other

Their network is mostly strong

Networks become weak only on the edges (ends) of the river but doesn't completely dimnish

With the available network length, the center of river bank forms the strongest network of all and becomes a key player in defining the balance property of overall network

The network is very well structurally balanced and we can see that through the below image

20 miles 10 20 30 40 50

See attachment file for diagram

Considering the total length of river as 50miles and and the center of the whole length will be at 25th mile. From that point, if we consider a farmer will be be having friends for a length of 20miles both along upstream and downstream.

By this he'll be in friend with people who are around 80% of the total population. As me move from this point the integrity increases and this results in a highly balanced structural network.