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A student has selected 8 books that she likes, but she has money only for 3 books. how many possible selections does she have?

User Burst
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2 Answers

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The student has 6,720 selections to choose from. Because order doesn’t matter, the problem is a combinations function. It is solved by dividing the factorial of 8 by the factorial of 3. So (8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1)/(3*2*1)
User Techie Joe
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Since the order of the books chosen doesn't matter, we use the combination formula to find the number of possible selections. Recall that a combination of k items from a set of n items is given by
nCk= (n!)/(k!(n-k)!).

In this problem, n = 8 and k = 3. So the number of possible selections is

8C3= (8!)/(3!(8-3)!)=56. Thus the answer is 56.
User Lookitsatravis
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