Number Of Shoes

A closet has 5 pairs of shoes. Find the number of ways in which 4 shoes can be chosen from it so that there will be no complete pair.


The answer is 80.

This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and, finally, (c) loading the non-javascript version of this page . We're sorry about the hassle.

2 solutions

Jordan Cahn
Jan 21, 2019

No two shoes can come from the same pair, so we must select four different pairs to choose shoes from. There are 5 5 ways to do this (each choice of four pairs leaves out one pair).

Now, we have two choices of shoe from each of these four pairs. That means there are 2 4 2^4 ways to select one shoe from each pair.

In total, we have 5 × 2 4 = 5 × 16 = 80 5\times 2^4 = 5\times 16 = \boxed{80} ways to chose four shoes from different pairs.

Mark Hennings
Jan 21, 2019

Let A j A_j (for 1 j 5 1 \le j \le 5 ) be the set of choices of four shoes that contain the j j th pair of shoes. Then A j = ( 8 2 ) = 28 1 j 5 A j A k = 1 1 j < k 5 A i A j A k = 1 < i < j < k 5 \begin{aligned} |A_j| & = \; \binom{8}{2} = 28 & & 1 \le j \le 5 \\ |A_j \cap A_k| & = \; 1 & & 1 \le j < k \le 5 \\ A_i \cap A_j \cap A_k & = \; \varnothing & & 1 <i < j < k \le 5 \end{aligned} so that A 1 A 2 A 3 A 4 A 5 = j = 1 5 A j j < k A j A k = 5 × 28 10 × 1 = 130 |A_1 \cup A_2 \cup A_3 \cup A_4 \cup A_5| \; = \; \sum_{j=1}^5 |A_j| - \sum_{j < k}|A_j \cap A_k| \; = \; 5 \times 28 - 10 \times 1 = 130 and hence the number of ways of choosing four shoes so that no pair has been chosen is ( 10 4 ) 130 = 80 \binom{10}{4} - 130 \; = \; \boxed{80}

0 pending reports

×

Problem Loading...

Note Loading...

Set Loading...