Question 1

[admin]

Your reasoning worked out but it is not sound. The issue comes down to this: you cannot magnify something that is not even there. Thus you cannot magnify a virtual image. The image must be real (meaning light actually passes through the image point) in order to further magnify that image.

[admin]

The answer to your question is "yes" and "no"!

The problem is you are confounding 2 very different situations.

You have correctly noted the situation for a single lens system. Indeed, the virtual image can possibly be enlarged in comparison with the object. But that is not the issue in this problem. The question is, can that virtual image be magnified by a second lens? The answer is a big "no". Because, you can't magnify what is not even there. Remember, the image of the first lens is now the object for the second lens. But the second lens finds no object because the image of the first lens was virtual.