Question

A moving company has a truck filled for deliveries to five different sites. If the order of the deliveries is randomly selected, what is the probability that it is the shortest route?

Answer 1

The probability of the truck taking the shortest route is 1/120 = 0.0083 or 0.83%.

Step-by-step explanation:

The probability of the truck taking the shortest route depends on the number of possible routes and the number of routes that are considered to be the shortest.

If there are 5 different delivery sites, there are 5! (5 factorial) = 120 possible routes.

In order for a route to be considered the shortest, it needs to have the minimum number of distances between sites.

This means that there is only one shortest route. Therefore, the probability of the truck taking the shortest route is 1/120 = 0.0083 (rounded to four decimal places) or 0.83%.