How many Lunch combination meals(If you must choose exactly

[dddanny2006]

Source-Veritas

How many Lunch combination meals(If you must choose exactly one of each :burger,side and drink) are possible at a fast food restaurant if you have 3 different burgers to choose from,three different drinks to choose from,and two different side to choose from?

The right answer is 18

This is my method of solving it-

3*3*2 ------------------Order doesn't matter,divide.
3!

Answer is 3.

Why am I wrong?We can have sides,drink,burger or burger,drink and sides.So order doesnt matter,but in the real answer they dont divide it by 3!.

Please explain.

[RonPurewal]

"Order matters" means that the "slots" for which you're picking things are indistinguishable. E.g., if you are picking a committee of 3 people, then being "the first person on the committee" is no different from being "the second" or "the third person", so that is an "order doesn't matter" type of situation.

Burgers, drinks, and sides are clearly distinguishable from each other, so this is not such a situation.

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[RonPurewal]

By the way, 2 things:

1/
You should know that the answer 3 is wrong, just by pure common sense.
There are 3 burgers to choose from, so, even if you had no choice at all of the other things, that'd already be 3 meal options. Since you can change the other things too, there are definitely more than 3 options.

2/
It should be easy enough for you to just list all the possibilities in this situation. You could easily make the whole list in a fraction of a minute.
If there are only a modest number of possibilities, just make a list, unless you are 100.0000000% sure of another approach.