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Trading cards (Posted on 2002-05-03) Difficulty: 3 of 5
A trading card series has 200 different cards in it, which are sold in 5-card packages.

Each package has a random sampling of the cards (assume that any card of the 200 has an equal chance of being in a package).

On the average, how many packages will need to be bought to collect the complete series if...

  • A: all the cards in a package will always be different
  • B: a package can have repeats

  • See The Solution Submitted by levik    
    Rating: 4.1818 (11 votes)

    Comments: ( Back to comment list | You must be logged in to post comments.)
    re: This should be the answer | Comment 13 of 39 |
    (In reply to This should be the answer by Sophia)

    you know here folks, this answer has a lot of merit. I spent some time on this problem from a mathematical view just as many of you did before I lost interest and checked it out. But take a look at the question and you'll see a couple of interesting facts.
    1)each card has an equal chance of being found in a pack i.e. no one card is more valuable than another.
    2)these are "trading" cards.
    Well, now, as I'm sure you see, just buy 40 packs for the required 200 cards, and trade with your friends to get the full set...
      Posted by Cory Taylor on 2002-11-29 08:58:07

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