There is no realistic alternative to solving this problem other than the strategy Jay outlined above.*
Questions that ask you "how many solutions are there?" can be very time-consuming, because you're never quite sure if you came up with every possibility. You might have thought of 5 of these, but missed the 6th.
My recommendation: if you see a question like this, look at the clock. If you're ahead of time, go ahead and list as many possibilities as you can. If you're behind, just guess and move on. It's easy to make a mistake on these, and there's no way to easily check your work, so it might not be worth your time.
*You might realize the combinatoric pattern that if we're choosing 4 values [w, x, y, z] out of 5 primes, we'll have 1 with 2 primes in each set, so 5C2. Since there are two 2's, several of these will be double-counted, and some of these pairings will *not* be the greatest value in the set. So it's still best to list out all the possibilities.
Ceilidh Erickson
EdM in Mind, Brain, and Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education
