a - The answer of 5,304 in NOT wrong! It just wasn't explained to you how they arrived at the answer. What is the difference between 1st term and 2nd term? 101 - 97 =4. Each term after the first is 4 LESS than the previous term.So, you get: 101 - 4 =97 - 4 =93 - 4 =89 - 4=85.........etc. all the way down to 5 - 4 =1. And then each term is "squared":
101^2 =10,201 - 97^2 =9,409 + 93^2 =8,649......etc.
This is the "closed form formula" that generates each term of your sequence: (-1)^(n+1)*(105 - 4*n)^2, where n=1 to 26.
And this is what you get, when you expand your sequence: [10201, -9409, 8649, -7921, 7225, -6561, 5929, -5329, 4761, -4225, 3721, -3249, 2809, -2401, 2025, -1681, 1369, -1089, 841, -625, 441, -289, 169, -81, 25, -1]
Sum them up on your calculator term by term and you should get =5,304.
I hope you understand it now. Good luck to you.