Help with a math problem!?

Question

Can you help me figure out the answer to this problem? I tried but keep getting different answers. If you know how to do it, could you explain, thanks.

If you go shopping and buy 3 pairs of socks, 4 pairs of pants and 5 shirts, how many outfits can you make?

Answer 1

60

Answer 2

Whenever you have a certain number of possibilities in different categories (here you have 3 categories, each with a different number of possibilities), you multiply the number of possibilities by each other.

So here you have 3 x 4 x 5 = 60 outfits.

You can see that this works because if you had only 2 pairs of socks (let's say one blue and one green) and 3 pairs of pants (one orange, one yellow, and one purple), you could easily build a chart.

blue socks and orange pants

blue socks and yellow pants

blue socks and purple pants

green socks and orange pants

green socks and yellow pants

green socks and purple pants

You have 2 categories, with 2 possibilities in one and 3 possibilities in the other. So you go 2 x 3 = 6 outfits. As you can see, when we made the chart above, we also got 6 outfits.