Fundamental Counting Principal - Problem 1

Using the fundamental counting principal to solve a number of options we have available to us. So what we're looking at now is a Pizza place and we're ordering a combo pizza which gives us your choice white or wheat crust one of seven meats and one of seven veggies and we are asking for how many pies can be made.

We could make a tree diagram, but hopefully you see that there is a lot of information out there and it's going to be pretty hard to draw all those branches, it's still able, but just would take a while.

So what we can do instead is just use the fundamental counting principal and multiply the number of options for each together so what I see is we have an option for crust white or wheat that's just going to give us two choices.

We then can go to our wheats we have one of seven choices we can choose sausage, pepperoni, Canadian bacon whatever it is, but we have 1 or 7 of those so we just multiply this by 7.

Lastly we have a choice of 5 veggies, so we can multiply that by those choices which is just going to be 5 and our end result is just going to be the product of all these numbers. 2 times 5 is 10 times 7 is 70.

So by using the fundamental counting principal, you're fairly easily able to see how many different options we could get given a situation.