jmc

Question

Acme Corporation has released an alphabet soup in which each of the vowels (A, E, I, O, U) of the English alphabet appears five times (and the consonants do not appear at all). How many five-letter words can be formed from a bowl of Acme Vowel Soup? (Note: The words do not have to be actual words in English!)

Accepted Answer

Clearly there are 5 choices for the first letter. Although it is tempting to think that there are 4 choices for the second letter, reading the problem carefully, we see that in the process of picking our five letters, we will never run out of any of our vowels, since there are five sets of each vowel. Therefore, we just multiply 5 by itself five times to get 5^5 = 3125.