Chris has 25 songs in his library and wants to put 12 of them into a playlist. If he picks songs at random, how many different groups of songs can be created?
1 Answer
Explanation:
We're working with a combination, which means a playlist that includes songs A and B, no matter the order, are the same (a permutation, on the other hand, counts playlists with different song orders as different).
The general equation for a combination is:
There are two ways to evaluate this - we can choose to go the multiplication route:
and work through that cancellation nightmare (but do-able on a simple calculator), or we can recognize that factorials are really just numbers (ex. 3! = 6, 4! = 24, etc) and so substitute in using a factorial table:
Since my calculator doesn't stand a chance of working this through, I'll copy and paste into google calculator:
and we get