Abdul Rahman wrote:
> Please help me with my statistics.
>
> Question:
>
> If you order a burger from McDonald's you have a choice of the following
> condiments:ketchup, mustard , lettuce. pickles, and mayonnaise. A
> customer can ask for all thesecondiments or any subset of them when he
> or she orders a burger. How many different combinations of condiments
> can be ordered? No condiment at all conts as one combination.
>
> Your help is badly needed
>
> Just an Idiot@leftover
Before you 'put yourself down' too hard, remember, ignorance can be cured,
but stupid is forever. I recommend you pick the former, given a choice.
So the recommended solution is a _combination_, not _permutation_. If you
say that a condiment can be (a) absent or (b) present, then you have the
6*5*4*3*2*1 _permutations_ possible.
For combinations, you will divide by the number of permutations for each
set of a selection. For example, for the number of possible combinations
of 2 items taken from the 6 possible, we would have
6C2 = 6*5*4*3*2*1/[(4*3*2*1)*(2*1)]
but then you would repeat for 1, 3, 4, and 5 items selected. I don't like
this - at this early hour (4:00 am local time) I sense something seriously
invalid.
Best go back to listing all the possibles. Keep in mind that for a
permutation, the empty (absent item) slot is different, if it is empty
ketchup or empty mustard. then see if the combination equation can cover
them.
I doubt there are 720 possible _combinations_.
Jay
--
Jay Warner
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