Q:

A Chinese restaurant offers 10 different lunch specials. Each weekday for one week, Fiona goes to the restaurant and selects a lunch special. How many different ways are there for her to select her lunches for the week? Note that which lunch she orders on which day matters, so the following two selections are considered different.One possible selection1.Mon: Kung pao chicken .2.Tues: Beef with broccoli3.Wed: Kung pao chicken4.Thurs: Moo shu pork5.Fri: Beef with broccoliA different selection:a.Mon: Beef with broccolib.Tues: Kung pao chickenc.Wed: Kung pao chickend.Thurs: Moo shu porke.Fri: Beef with broccoliNow suppose that in addition to selecting her main course, she also selects between water or tea for her drink. How many ways are there for her to select her lunches?

Accepted Solution

A:
Answer:[tex]\frac{10!}{(10-5)!}[/tex]Step-by-step explanation:Fiona will attend the restaurant for 5 days, so she will get to choose only 5 out of the 10 menus. At first, recall that the number of ways in which you can pick k elements out of n, without minding the order is [tex]\binom{n}{k} = \frac{n!}{(n-k)!k!}[/tex]. Now, consider that for each group of k elements that you choose, you can order it in k! different ways. Suppose that you have k boxes, that you want to fill out with the k elements you pick. So, for the first box you have k options, for the second one you have k-1 options. Continuing in this fashion, you will have k! differnt ways of ordering the k elements. So, in total, when order matters, you have [tex]\binom{n}{k}\cdot k![/tex] ways of choosing. For our case, we have n=10 and k=5, which gives us [tex]\binom{10}{5}\cdot 5! = \frac{10!}{(10-5)! 5!}\cdot 5! = \frac{10!}{(10-5)!}[/tex]