this taskmost people would not begin with the first exam and flip through one at time until the requested exam is foundas would be done with linear search insteadyou would probably flip to the middle and determine if the requested exam comes alphabetically before or after that one assuming jessica' paper follows alphabetically after the middle oneyou know it cannot possibly be in the top half of the stack insteadyou would probably continue searching in similar fashion by splitting the remaining stack of exams in half to determine which portion contains jessica' exam this is an example of divide and conquer strategywhich entails dividing larger problem into smaller parts and conquering the smaller part algorithm description the binary search algorithm works in similar fashion to the process described above and can be applied to sorted sequence the algorithm starts by examining the middle item of the sorted sequenceresulting in one of three possible conditionsthe middle item is the target valuethe target value is less than the middle itemor the target is larger than the middle item since the sequence is orderedwe can eliminate half the values in the list when the target value is not found at the middle position consider the task of searching for value in the sorted array from figure we first determine which element contains the middle entry as illustrated in figure the middle entry contains which is greater than our target of thuswe can discard the upper half of the array from consideration since cannot possibly be in that part having eliminated the upper halfwe repeat the process on the lower half of the array we then find the middle item of the lower half and compare its value to the target since that entrywhich contains is less than the targetwe can eliminate the lower fourth of the array the process is repeated on the remaining items upon finding value in the middle entry from among those remainingthe process terminates successfully if we had not found the targetthe process would continue until either the target value was found or we had eliminated all values from consideration start figure searching for in sorted array using the binary search