gagangm wrote:
Tom has 40 movies in total. In that, 17 of them are action movies, 14 are comedy movies, and 9 re history movies. If Tom wants to arrange his movies such that all the action movies are together, and all comedy movies together and he can arrange his history movies in the chronological manner in which the histories have taken place. How many ways he can arrange?
There are a couple of reasons this could never be a true GRE question.
First, what does it mean to say "...he
CAN arrange his history movies in the chronological manner in which the histories have taken place."
Is it a requirement to arrange the movies in chronological order OR is it something that we may or may not do?
Second, the actual answer is far too big for a GRE Numeric Entry question.
If we allow for the history movies to be arranged in any order, then the correct answer is (3!)(17!)(14!)(9!)
Since we can't just enter factorial notation in a numeric entry question, we'd have to evaluate the above to get a VERY big 32-digit number.
Since the GRE's on-screen calculator cannot calculate such a big number, test takers would have to perform the calculation by hand!!
Cheers,
Brent