What is the Pattern for Finding the Missing Number in a Sequence?

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Homework Statement
what's the missing number
Relevant Equations
nothing comes to mind
I have no idea. I've tried squaring, cubing, summing numbers but can't make sense of anything. Literally no clue how to even approach this aside from randomly adding and subtracting numbers, their squares and cubes, but nothing makes sense. Any ideas?

Three boxes with numbers around each: the first box shows 28 with 5 above, 3 right, 2 below and 1 left; the second shows 232 with 11 above, 18 below, 5 left and 3 right; the third shows a question mark with 15 above, 25 below, 18 left and 16 right; answer choices 1362, 1361, 1360, 1390 are listed below.
 
anuttarasammyak said:
28=4*7=(1+3)*(5+2)
How on Earth did you know to do this? Just random guessing? What all did you check prior to this?
 
joshmccraney said:
Just random guessing?
Not really. The very first thing I tried, for all of about 5 seconds, was addition, which seemed a dead end. Then I noticed that in the first problem 5 and 2 added to 7, and 3 and 1 added to 4 -- 4 * 7 = 28. The pattern was the same for the second problem.
 
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Mark44 said:
Not really. The very first thing I tried, for all of about 5 seconds, was addition, which seemed a dead end. Then I noticed that in the first problem 5 and 2 added to 7, and 3 and 1 added to 4 -- 4 * 7 = 28. The pattern was the same for the second problem.
Makes sense, thanks.