Problem 8 · 2002 AMC 8
Medium
Arithmetic & Operations
read-tablecareful-counting
Juan organizes the stamps in his collection by country and by the decade in which they were issued. He paid these prices at the stamp shop: Brazil and France, 6¢ each; Peru, 4¢ each; and Spain, 5¢ each. (Brazil and Peru are South American countries; France and Spain are European.) The table shows how many stamps he has from each country and decade.
How many of his European stamps were issued in the 1980s?
| Country | '50s | '60s | '70s | '80s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brazil | 4 | 7 | 12 | 8 |
| France | 8 | 4 | 12 | 15 |
| Peru | 6 | 4 | 6 | 10 |
| Spain | 3 | 9 | 13 | 9 |
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Answer: D — 24.
Show hints
Hint 1 of 2
The prices are a trap here — the question asks *how many* stamps, not their cost. Ignore the cents entirely.
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Hint 2 of 2
Pin down the right cells before adding: "European" picks the France and Spain rows, "1980s" picks one column. You only need the two numbers where those meet.
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Approach: read the European rows in the 1980s column
- First filter, then add. "European" = France and Spain rows; "1980s" = the '80s column. That isolates exactly two cells: 15 and 9.
- 15 + 9 = 24 stamps. (The prices in the problem are bait — a count question never needs them.)
- *The habit:* on a table problem, translate each describing word into a row-filter or column-filter *first*, grab only the cells that survive, then compute. It stops you from summing the wrong block.
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