My eight year old son had this question on his mathematics homework yesterday:
“Kari has a red, blue, green and yellow shirt. She has a skirt and a pair of jeans. How many outfits can she make?”
What is the answer? Explain your reasoning.
My eight year old son had this question on his mathematics homework yesterday:
“Kari has a red, blue, green and yellow shirt. She has a skirt and a pair of jeans. How many outfits can she make?”
What is the answer? Explain your reasoning.
She can make 2 outfits. She has one shirt with 4 different colors, a pair of jeans and a skirt. This only makes two outfits 🙂
Did I get it right?
Maybe! 😉
Let’s see if we get any other answers.
720 possible outfits.
Start with a pair of jeans and four possible shirts to go with it = 4 outfits.
A skirt and four possible shirts = another 4, for 8 outfits total.
Wear the skirt over the pair of jeans, there are another 4 combos with the shirts, for 12 outfits total.
Wear a short sleeve shirt over the long sleeve shirt and that gives you 4 outfits with a skirt, 4 with jeans, and 4 with skirt and jeans for 24 total…
Continuing this method to its final conclusion, the possible number of combinations are “6!” which is “6x5x4x3x2x1”, with the last combination in the list being wearing all six items at once.
Addendum to above:
This number of combinations can be increased if you consider different ways of wearing each outfit as “different” outfits. For example, wearing one shirt over the other instead of under it, or tying one around your waist. Or wearing the shirt as pants and waring the pants on your arms. With these combinations, the answer would start to approach infinity.
Bahahahahahaha!!!
These are a better answers than any I’d come up with!
Think outside the box, Ellen.
Indeed! Thank you for teaching me how!
That’s the direction I was going too, Jason. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting for me!
Keri could wear a shirt without a skirt or jeans if it were long enough to fit her. And then wrap the jeans around the waist for when it gets cold. Although, that won’t happen here in Pasadena for at least the rest of the week So add that in to the combinatorial analysis and let’s see how many permutation there would be! Just the normal stuff though. I’d of put the jeans, skirt or shirt on top of my head earlier today if I didn’t have a photon interceptor (oh, I mean umbrella) handy when I walked over to the dentist’s office…
John Donlin (Ellen’s brother)
what was David’s answer??
None of the above. I’ll post it when I have more time. The “correct” answer has not yet been given here. 😉
And the “correct” answer is … 8
David’s math homework papers have the final answers on them so that the student can check their work. They are multi-step problems, so we were able to deduce the expected answer. However, the first sentence deconstructed in an English class would show, once the adjectives were taken away, that the subject is “a … shirt”. So Sarah gets the prize for the linguistically correct answer. Jason gets the prize for the wardrobe-correct answer. And David gets the prize for figuring out and writing down the expected answer while also understanding that the question is badly written.
Hi Ellen!
Well it depends on the wording. Does she have 1 shirt with 4 colors or 4 shirts with one color each? Plus I’ve seen girls that like wearing a skirt over a pair of jeans! If there were 4 shirts the number of shirt combos (no law against wearing more than one shirt at one time) with either the pants or skirt would be 4! (factorial) which is 24. Since shirt is not plural, I’ll assume a single 4 color shirt with either the jeans, the skirt, both skirt and jeans or neither (using the shirt as a long skirt. So that makes 4 outfits. ALso just for the record full or partial birthday suits don’t count.
So I’ll say 4 outfits.
John