A community of 3 people is to be selected from 5 married couples, such that the community does not include two people who are married to each other. How many such communities are possible?
This is a combination problem involving a restriction, so recall that:
total number of selections = restricted selections + permitted selections
or
permitted selections = total number of selections - restricted selections
The total number of selections is just all the ways we can pull 3 people out of 10 or 10C3. The restricted selections can be computed by selecting any of the 5 couples, and then any person from the remaining 8 individuals or 5*8.
So we have:
permitted selections = 10C3 - (5*8) = 80.












