2018 AMC 10B Problems/Problem 5

Problem

How many subsets of $\{2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9\}$ contain at least one prime number?

$\textbf{(A)} \text{ 128} \qquad \textbf{(B)} \text{ 192} \qquad \textbf{(C)} \text{ 224} \qquad \textbf{(D)} \text{ 240} \qquad \textbf{(E)} \text{ 256}$

Solution

Consider finding the number of subsets that do not contain any primes. There are four primes in the set: $2$ , $3$ , $5$ , and $7$ . This means that the number of subsets without any primes is the number of subsets of $\{4, 6, 8, 9\}$ , which is just $2^4 = 16$ . The number of subsets with at least one prime is the number of subsets minus the number of subsets without any primes. The number of subsets is $2^8 = 256$ . Thus, the answer is $256 - 16 = 240$ . $\boxed{D}$

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2018 AMC 10B Problems/Problem 5

Problem

Solution