Fruit line-up

This grocer wants to arrange his fruit in a particular order, can you help him?
Exploring and noticing Working systematically Conjecturing and generalising Visualising and representing Reasoning, convincing and proving
Being curious Being resourceful Being resilient Being collaborative

Problem



A grocer places some oranges, peaches, apples and bananas in a row so that somewhere in the row, each type of fruit can be found next to each other type of fruit.

What is the smallest possible number of fruits in the row?

If you liked this problem, here is an NRICH task which challenges you to use similar mathematical ideas.