Question

An old-fashioned Chinese restaurant offers a family dinner where you get to choose one dish from “column A” (which has 8 dishes), one dish from “column B” (which has 10 dishes) and one dish from “column C” (which has 5 dishes). How many different family dinners can be chosen?

There are ___ possible dinners.

Answer 1

There are 400 possible dinners.

Explanation:

There are 8 dishes to choose from column A. For each of these 8 dishes, there are 10 dishes to pair with. For each of these 10 dishes, there are 5 dishes to go with from column C.

Therefore, multiply to get
`8\cdot 10\cdot 5=\boxed{400}` possible dinners.

*Note: Since the order of which you choose is fixed, we do not need to account for rearrangements of the same three dishes.