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Counting outcomes: flower pots

Find the number of ways you can put four types of flowers into three types of pots.

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Video transcript

- [Voiceover] You're at a florist store and you're interested in buying some type of a potted flower. And you ask the florist, "What type of flowers do you sell?" And he says, "Well we sell four types of flowers, we sell "roses, tulips, sunflowers, and lilies." And you say, "What type of pots could I put them in?" And he says, "Well you could pick any flower, and then you "could pick any of our three pots, we have brown pots, "we have yellow pots, and we have green pots." So, the question that I ask to you is, how many types of, I guess, flower and pots put together can you walk out of this florist store with? For example, you could get a rose and a brown pot, you could get a rose and a green pot. Or you could get a yellow pot that has a sunflower in it. Or a yellow pot that has a lily in it. So, how many scenarios could you walk out of that store with? And like always, I'll encourage you to pause the video and try to figure it out on your own. Let's think through it. I'll just write the first letters, just to visualize or just so I don't have to write down everything. So, you could have a brown pot, you could have a yellow pot, or you could have a green pot. You difinitely have to pick a pot, so you're going to have one of those. And then for each of these three, there's four possible flowers you could have. You could have a rose with the brown pot, you could have a rose with the yellow pot, you could have a rose with the green pot. You could have a tulip with the brown pot, a tulip with the yellow pot, a tulip with the green pot. You could have a sunflower with each of the three pots, or you could have a lily with the brown pot, a lily with the yellow pot, and a lily with a green pot. So, how many scenarios are we talking about? Well, we had three pots, so we have three pots right over here, and we have four possible flowers to put in the pots, and so we see that we have four possible flowers for each of the three pots. It's going to be three times four possibilites, or 12. You see them right over here. This is brown with rose, brown with tulip, brown with sunflower, brown with lily. Yellow with rose, yellow with tulip, yellow with sunflower, yellow with lily. So, if we count these, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Twelve possible pot, flower scenarios to walk out of that florist store with.