Problem Solving

tohellandback wrote:A second grade class is writing reports on birds. The students' teacher has given them a list of four birds they can choose to write about. If Lizzy wants to write a report that includes two or three of the birds, how many different reports can she write?

I've commented on this problem elsewhere, but the wording is terrible. The question asks how many different reports she can write; well clearly she can write a nearly infinite number of different reports even after choosing what birds to write about. The question means to ask how many different selections of birds she could make, and it isn't clear if the order should matter: will the report be in chapters, one about each bird, and will a different sequence of chapters make one report different from another? Or are we only being asked how many different sets of birds she could choose? In any case, the question is ambiguous, and no real GMAT counting question is ever unclear about whether order matters, so this question is not worth spending any time on.