Please help at a competition with 5 runners, medals are awards for first second and third place each of the 3 medals is diffrent how many ways are there to award the medals?

decide if this is a permutation or a combination and find the number of ways to award the medals

Permutation; 60 ways

Step-by-step explanation:

In this question, we are asked to determine if what to use is a permutation or a combination and proceed to determine the number of ways to award the medals.

now, to determine if what to use at a particular scenario is combination or permutations, we need to know the whether we are selecting or we are arranging. when we are selecting, this is a combination issue while we are arranging it is a permutation issue.

as seen from the question, it is a matter of position, thus indicating that we are making an arrangement, meaning we are to use permutation.

Now, we calculate the number of ways;

we are awarding 3 medals to a total of 5 people.

the number of permutations here is simply;

5P3 =5!/(5-3)! = 5!/2! = 60 ways