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Problem 58

AMC 10/12, early questions

Combinatorics Difficulty 3.1 Find the answer

A dessert chef prepares the dessert for every day of a week starting with Sunday. The dessert each day is either cake, pie, ice cream, or pudding. The same dessert may not be served two days in a row. There must be cake on Friday because of a birthday. How many different dessert menus for the week are possible?
$\textbf{(A)}\ 729\qquad\textbf{(B)}\ 972\qquad\textbf{(C)}\ 1024\qquad\textbf{(D)}\ 2187\qquad\textbf{(E)}\ 2304$

Your answer

Official solution

Desserts must be chosen for $7$ days: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
There are $3$ choices for dessert on Saturday: pie, ice cream, or pudding, as there must be cake on Friday and the same dessert may not be served two days in a row. Likewise, there are $3$ choices for dessert on Thursday. Once dessert for Thursday is selected, there are $3$ choices for dessert on Wednesday, once Wednesday's dessert is selected there are $3$ choices for dessert on Tuesday, etc. Thus, there are $3$ choices for dessert for each of $6$ days, so the total number of possible dessert menus is $3^6$ , or $\boxed{\textbf{(A)}\ 729}$ .

Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic, difficulty and ordering added by this site.