Solving Pizza Ordering Dilemmas for Student Council

  • Thread starter Thread starter chemzz
  • Start date Start date
AI Thread Summary
The student council is tasked with ordering pizza for a meeting, needing to accommodate both vegetarian and non-vegetarian members. A committee of three must include at least one vegetarian and one non-vegetarian, which raises questions about the selection process. The committee will choose from 10 toppings, aiming for variety while ensuring each pizza has at least one topping. Discussions highlight the importance of the fundamental counting principle for solving these combinatorial problems. The conversation encourages members to attempt the calculations independently to enhance understanding.
chemzz
Messages
18
Reaction score
0
A student council is ordering pizza for their next meeting. There are 20 council members, 7 of whom are vegetarian. A committee of 3 will order 6 pizzas from a pizza shop that has a special price for large pizzas with up to three toppings. The shop offers 10 different toppings.
a) How many different pizza committees can the council choose if there must be at leat 1 vegetarian and 1 non vegetarian on the committee?
b) In how many ways could the committee choose up to 3 toppings for a pizza?
c) The committee wants as much variety as possible in the toppings. They decide to order each topping exactly once and to have at least one topping on each pizza. Describe the different cases possible when distributing the toppings in this way.

d) For one of these cases determine the number of ways of choosing and distributing the 10 toppings.



i'm really confised on how to go about it...so i really don't know how to try it...:frown:
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Are you sure this isn't a homework problem?!

How many ways are there to choose a vegetarian? How many ways are there to choose a non-vegetarian? How many people are left to choose the third member from?

Do you know the "fundamental law of counting"? If even A can happen in m ways and event B can happen in n ways, independently of A, then A and B can happen together in mn ways. That's the basic rule for all problems like these.

Now, try them yourself and let us see what you do.
 
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Probability-Statistics-2077/probability-18.htm
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I picked up this problem from the Schaum's series book titled "College Mathematics" by Ayres/Schmidt. It is a solved problem in the book. But what surprised me was that the solution to this problem was given in one line without any explanation. I could, therefore, not understand how the given one-line solution was reached. The one-line solution in the book says: The equation is ##x \cos{\omega} +y \sin{\omega} - 5 = 0##, ##\omega## being the parameter. From my side, the only thing I could...
Back
Top