help with this

Question

A restaurant is offering a 5-course meal with 3 choices for an appetizer, 6 choices of pasta, 2 choices for a salad, 4 choices for the main course and 5 choices for dessert. How many different meals could be created from this menu?

 

Answer 1

Assuming each meal consists of exactly one of {appetizer, pasta, salad, main course, dessert}  then you have

3*6*2*4*5 = 720 possible 5-course meals

 

 

As an aside:  if you were to allow a person to skip a any one or more of those courses, that essentially adds one choice ("skip") to each course:   4*7*3*5*6 = 2520 possible meals with 5 or fewer courses