Maths Olympiad Prep

Track / Stage 3 / 57 of 260 #57 of 1964

Problem 57

AMC 10/12, early questions
Combinatorics Difficulty 3.1 Multiple choice

Three fair six-sided dice are rolled. What is the probability that the values shown on two of the dice sum to the value shown on the remaining die?

Pick one

Official solution

First, we note that there are 1,2,3,4,1, 2, 3, 4, and 55 ways to get sums of 2,3,4,5,62, 3, 4, 5, 6 respectively--this is not too hard to see. With any specific sum, there is exactly one way to attain it on the other die. This means that the probability that two specific dice have the same sum as the other is 16(1+2+3+4+536)=572.\dfrac16 \left( \dfrac{1+2+3+4+5}{36}\right) = \dfrac{5}{72}. Since there are (31)\dbinom31 ways to choose which die will be the one with the sum of the other two, our answer is 3572=(D)5243 \cdot \dfrac{5}{72} = \boxed{\textbf{(D)} \: \dfrac{5}{24}}.

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