Basic Counting

In a long line of people arranged left to right, the 1013th person from the left is also the 1010th person from the right. How many people are in the line?

In the expression $\left(\underline{\qquad}\times\underline{\qquad}\right)+\left(\underline{\qquad}\times\underline{\qquad}\right)$ each blank is to be filled in with one of the digits $1,2,3,$ or $4,$ with each digit being used once. How many different values can be obtained?

How many subsets of $\{2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9\}$ contain at least one prime number?

Kate bakes a $20$ -inch by $18$ -inch pan of cornbread. The cornbread is cut into pieces that measure $2$ inches by $2$ inches. How many pieces of cornbread does the pan contain?

A basketball player made $5$ baskets during a game. Each basket was worth either $2$ or $3$ points. How many different numbers could represent the total points scored by the player?

Each row of the Misty Moon Amphitheater has $33$ seats. Rows $12$ through $22$ are reserved for a youth club. How many seats are reserved for this club?

How many two-digit positive integers have at least one $7$ as a digit?

In how many ways can $6$ juniors and $6$ seniors form $3$ disjoint teams of $4$ people so that each team has $2$ juniors and $2$ seniors?

An integer is assigned to each vertex of a cube. The value of an edge is defined to be the sum of the values of the two vertices it touches, and the value of a face is defined to be the sum of the values of the four edges surrounding it. The value of the cube is defined as the sum of the values of its six faces. …

How many three-digit positive integers have an odd number of even digits?

How many distinguishable arrangements are there of $1$ brown tile, $1$ purple tile, $2$ green tiles, and $3$ yellow tiles in a row from left to right? (Tiles of the same color are indistinguishable.)

How many $4$ -digit positive integers (that is, integers between $1000$ and $9999$ , inclusive) having only even digits are divisible by $5?$

At a gathering of $30$ people, there are $20$ people who all know each other and $10$ people who know no one. People who know each other hug, and people who do not know each other shake hands. How many handshakes occur?

Ann made a 3-step staircase using 18 toothpicks as shown in the figure. How many toothpicks does she need to add to complete a 5-step staircase?

A student council must select a two-person welcoming committee and a three-person planning committee from among its members. There are exactly 10 ways to select a two-person team for the welcoming committee. It is possible for students to serve on both committees. In how many different ways can a three-person planning …

A student must choose a program of four courses from a menu of courses consisting of English, Algebra, Geometry, History, Art, and Latin. This program must contain English and at least one mathematics course. In how many ways can this program be chosen?

How many even integers are there between 200 and 700 whose digits are all different and come from the set {1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9}?

How many $7$ -digit palindromes (numbers that read the same backward as forward) can be formed using the digits $2$ , $2$ , $3$ , $3$ , $5$ , $5$ , $5$ ?

By inserting parentheses, it is possible to give the expression $$2\times3 + 4\times5$$ several values. How many different values can be obtained?

Two tour guides are leading six tourists. The guides decide to split up. Each tourist must choose one of the guides, but with the stipulation that each guide must take at least one tourist. How many different groupings of guides and tourists are possible?

On the trip home from the meeting where this AMC10 was constructed, the Contest Chair noted that his airport parking receipt had digits of the form $bbcac,$ where $0 \le a < b < c \le 9,$ and $b$ was the average of $a$ and $c.$ How many different five-digit numbers satisfy all these properties?

At a party, each man danced with exactly three women and each woman danced with exactly two men. Twelve men attended the party. How many women attended the party?

Henry's Hamburger Haven offers its hamburgers with the following condiments: ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, tomato, lettuce, pickles, cheese, and onions. A customer can choose one, two,or three meat patties and any collection of condiments. How many different kinds of hamburgers can be ordered?

A restaurant offers three desserts, and exactly twice as many appetizers as main courses. A dinner consists of an appetizer, a main course, and a dessert. What is the least number of main courses that a restaurant should offer so that a customer could have a different dinner each night in the year $2003$ ?

Nebraska, the home of the AMC, changed its license plate scheme. Each old license plate consisted of a letter followed by four digits. Each new license plate consists of three letters followed by three digits. By how many times has the number of possible license plates increased?

Using the letters $A$ , $M$ , $O$ , $S$ , and $U$ , we can form five-letter "words". If these "words" are arranged in alphabetical order, then the "word" $USAMO$ occupies position

How many ordered triples of integers $(x, y, z)$ satisfy the following system of inequalities? \begin{align} -x-y-z&\le -2\\ -x+y+z&\le 2\\ x-y+z&\le 2\\ x+y-z&\le 2 \end{align}

Carlos uses a $4$ -digit passcode to unlock his computer. In his passcode, exactly one digit is even, exactly one (possibly different) digit is prime, and no digit is $0$ . How many $4$ -digit passcodes satisfy these conditions?

A group of $100$ students from different countries meet at a mathematics competition. Each student speaks the same number of languages, and, for every pair of students $A$ and $B$ , student $A$ speaks some language that student $B$ does not speak, and student $B$ speaks some language that student $A$ does not speak. …

Define an $upno$ to be a positive integer of $2$ or more digits where the digits are strictly increasing moving left to right. Similarly, define a $downno$ to be a positive integer of $2$ or more digits where the digits are strictly decreasing moving left to right. For instance, the number $258$ is an upno and $8620$ …

Values for $A,B,C,$ and $D$ are to be selected from $\{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6\}$ without replacement (i.e. no two letters have the same value). How many ways are there to make such choices so that the two curves $y=Ax^2+B$ and $y=Cx^2+D$ intersect? (The order in which the curves are listed does not matter; for example, the …

Each of the $20$ balls is tossed independently and at random into one of the $5$ bins. Let $p$ be the probability that some bin ends up with $3$ balls, another with $5$ balls, and the other three with $4$ balls each. Let $q$ be the probability that every bin ends up with $4$ balls. What is $\frac{p}{q}$ ?

A child builds towers using identically shaped cubes of different colors. How many different towers with a height $8$ cubes can the child build with $2$ red cubes, $3$ blue cubes, and $4$ green cubes? (One cube will be left out.)

Call a positive integer $\textbf{monotonous}$ if it is a one-digit number or its digits, when read from left to right, form either a strictly increasing or a strictly decreasing sequence. For example, $3$ , $23578$ , and $987620$ are monotonous, but $88$ , $7434$ , and $23557$ are not. How many monotonous positive …

Claudia has 12 coins, each of which is a 5-cent coin or a 10-cent coin. There are exactly 17 different values that can be obtained as combinations of one or more of her coins. How many 10-cent coins does Claudia have?

A particular $12$ -hour digital clock displays the hour and minute of a day. Unfortunately, whenever it is supposed to display a $1$ , it mistakenly displays a $9$ . For example, when it is 1:16 PM the clock incorrectly shows 9:96 PM. What fraction of the day will the clock show the correct time?

A set of $25$ square blocks is arranged into a $5 \times 5$ square. How many different combinations of $3$ blocks can be selected from that set so that no two are in the same row or column?

How many four-digit positive integers have at least one digit that is a $2$ or a $3$ ?

A license plate in a certain state consists of $4$ digits, not necessarily distinct, and $2$ letters, also not necessarily distinct. These six characters may appear in any order, except that the two letters must appear next to each other. How many distinct license plates are possible?

All of David's telephone numbers have the form $555-abc-defg$ , where $a$ , $b$ , $c$ , $d$ , $e$ , $f$ , and $g$ are distinct digits and in increasing order, and none is either $0$ or $1$ . How many different telephone numbers can David have?

What is the average (mean) of all 5-digit numbers that can be formed by using each of the digits 1, 3, 5, 7, and 8 exactly once?

The $5\times 5$ grid shown contains a collection of squares with sizes from $1\times 1$ to $5\times 5$ . How many of these squares contain the black center square?

A group of $16$ people will be partitioned into $4$ indistinguishable $4$ -person committees. Each committee will have one chairperson and one secretary. The number of different ways to make these assignments can be written as $3^{r}M$ , where $r$ and $M$ are positive integers and $M$ is not divisible by $3$ . What is …

Suppose that $13$ cards numbered $1, 2, 3, \ldots, 13$ are arranged in a row. The task is to pick them up in numerically increasing order, working repeatedly from left to right. In the example below, cards $1, 2, 3$ are picked up on the first pass, $4$ and $5$ on the second pass, $6$ on the third pass, $7, 8, 9, 10$ on …

Regular polygons with $5,6,7,$ and $8$ sides are inscribed in the same circle. No two of the polygons share a vertex, and no three of their sides intersect at a common point. At how many points inside the circle do two of their sides intersect?

There are $10$ people standing equally spaced around a circle. Each person knows exactly $3$ of the other $9$ people: the $2$ people standing next to him or her, as well as the person directly across the circle. How many ways are there for the $10$ people to split up into $5$ pairs so that the members of each pair know …

Square $ABCD$ in the coordinate plane has vertices at the points $A(1,1), B(-1,1), C(-1,-1),$ and $D(1,-1).$ Consider the following four transformations: $\quad\bullet\qquad$ $L,$ a rotation of $90^{\circ}$ counterclockwise around the origin; $\quad\bullet\qquad$ $R,$ a rotation of $90^{\circ}$ clockwise around the …

As shown in the figure below, a regular dodecahedron (the polyhedron consisting of $12$ congruent regular pentagonal faces) floats in empty space with two horizontal faces. Note that there is a ring of five slanted faces adjacent to the top face, and a ring of five slanted faces adjacent to the bottom face. How many …

How many triangles with positive area have all their vertices at points $(i,j)$ in the coordinate plane, where $i$ and $j$ are integers between $1$ and $5$ , inclusive?

Amy, Beth, and Jo listen to four different songs and discuss which ones they like. No song is liked by all three. Furthermore, for each of the three pairs of the girls, there is at least one song liked by those girls but disliked by the third. In how many different ways is this possible?

Eight points are chosen on a circle, and chords are drawn connecting every pair of points. No three chords intersect in a single point inside the circle. How many triangles with all three vertices in the interior of the circle are created?

Two subsets of the set $S=\lbrace a,b,c,d,e\rbrace$ are to be chosen so that their union is $S$ and their intersection contains exactly two elements. In how many ways can this be done, assuming that the order in which the subsets are chosen does not matter?

A large equilateral triangle is constructed by using toothpicks to create rows of small equilateral triangles. For example, in the figure, we have $3$ rows of small congruent equilateral triangles, with $5$ small triangles in the base row. How many toothpicks would be needed to construct a large equilateral triangle if …

Call a positive integer fair if no digit is used more than once, it has no 0s, and no digit is adjacent to two greater digits. For example, $196$ , $23$ , and $12463$ are fair, but $1546$ , $320$ , and $34321$ are not fair. How many fair positive integers are there?

How many integers between $100$ and $999$ , inclusive, have the property that some permutation of its digits is a multiple of $11$ between $100$ and $999?$ For example, both $121$ and $211$ have this property.

All 20 diagonals are drawn in a regular octagon. At how many distinct points in the interior of the octagon (not on the boundary) do two or more diagonals intersect?

Adam, Benin, Chiang, Deshawn, Esther, and Fiona have internet accounts. Some, but not all, of them are internet friends with each other, and none of them has an internet friend outside this group. Each of them has the same number of internet friends. In how many different ways can this happen?