Maths Olympiad Prep

Track / Stage 3 / 126 of 260 #126 of 1964

Problem 126

AMC 10/12, early questions
Combinatorics Difficulty 3.3 Find the answer

Which of the following is equivalent to "If P is true, then Q is false."?

A number or a short expression. Fractions can be typed as 3/2, and spacing doesn't matter.

Next problem →

Official solution

Remember that a statement is logically equivalent to its contrapositive, which is formed by first negating the hypothesis and conclusion and then switching them. In this case, the contrapositive of "If P is true, then Q is false." is "If Q is true, then P is false." D\boxed{\text{D}}
The fact that a statement's contrapositive is logically equivalent to it can easily be seen from a venn diagram arguement.

From this venn diagram, clearly "If pp, then qq." is true. However, since pp is fully contained in qq, the statement "If not qq, then not pp." is also true, and so a statement and its contrapositive are equivalent.

Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty, ordering) added by this project.