Question 40624
Hi,

I don't quite understand the question. So I'm going to restate it as what I think it means, and hopefully we'll both be on the same wavelength. Using any of the letters O, L, I, V, E at most once. How many distinct three letter words can you make?

This is quite simple really. You just have to think about how many choices there are for each letter of your three letter word.

For the first letter you can choose any one of the five letters.
For the second letter you can only choose four letters as you've already taken one of them.
For the third letter you can choose any of the three remaining letters so in total that is 5*4*3=60 different words.

I don't know whether you've met it yet, but there is a function callled the permutation function that works this out.

*[tex P(n,r)=\frac{n!}{(n-r)!}]

So P(5,3)=120/2=60.

Hope that helps,
Kev