Olympiad Maths Prep

Track / Stage 3 / 106 of 260 #106 of 2000

Problem 106

AMC 10/12, early questions
Combinatorics Difficulty 3.3 Find the answer

Which of the following is equivalent to "If P is true, then Q is false."?

Official solution

Remember that a statement is logically equivalent to its contrapositive, which is formed by first negating the hypothesis and conclusion and then switching them. In this case, the contrapositive of "If P is true, then Q is false." is "If Q is true, then P is false." D\boxed{\text{D}}
The fact that a statement's contrapositive is logically equivalent to it can easily be seen from a venn diagram arguement.

From this venn diagram, clearly "If pp, then qq." is true. However, since pp is fully contained in qq, the statement "If not qq, then not pp." is also true, and so a statement and its contrapositive are equivalent.

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