A hospital cafeteria offers a fixed-price lunch consisting of a main course, a dessert, and a drink. If there are four main courses, three desserts, and six drinks to pick from, in how many ways can a customer select a meal consisting of one choice from each category?

The number of ways in which the meal can be selected.

Approach:

The Fundamental counting principle states that “For any number of events E1,E2,.....,En occurs in n1,n2,....,nn number of ways, then the whole event can occur in n1×n2×....×nn ways.”

The number of ways in which the meal can be selected is given by,

Number of ways=n1×n2×n3 ...(1)

Given:

Number of main course items are 4