Is an outcome where sprinter A finishes first different from an outcome where sprinter B finishes first? What could that tell us?
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Practice makes perfect
We want to find how many ways there are for eight sprinters to finish the race. Note that, we care about the order of those sprinters. Therefore, each possible arrangement is a permutation. To calculate the answer, we will use the formula for permutations of n objects taken r at a time.
_n P_r = n!/(n-r)!
We have eight people who are taking eight different places at a time, assuming that we have no ties. This means that both n and r are 8. Let's substitute 8 for n and r in the above formula.
