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1a. Let A be the set of people who speak English and B be the set of people who speak English
with an Australian accent. B is a subset of A.
1b. Let A be the set of fruits and B be the set of citrus fruits. B is a subset of A.
1c. Let A be the set of students studying discrete math and B be the set of students studying
data structures. A is not a subset of B nor is B a subset of A. There could be students studying
discrete math but not data structures (e.g. math majors) or there could be computer science
students studying data structures who havent yet taken a formal class in discrete mathematics.
2a. true
2b. false
2c. true
2d. true
3. Suppose A, B and C are sets such that Show that .
Proof: implies that if then . similarly implies that if y is an element
of B then it must be an element of C. Thus it follows that if x belongs A, then it must belong to B
which in turn belongs to C giving the result .
4. Can you include that A = B if A and B are two sets with the same power set? Yes.
Proof #1 (Proof by Contradiction): Suppose not. Suppose that there exist sets A and B that have
the same power set but are not equal as sets. This implies that either A has an element that is
not in B or B has an element that is not in A. Assume the former case (can argue symmetrically
in the latter case). Let x be an element of A that is not in B. implies that {} .
Since it follows that {} . However, this contradicts the assumption that P(A) = P(B).
Thus it must be the case that A = B.
Proof #2 (Direct Proof):
Case 1: A and B are finite: Since A is finite its power set P(A) must be finite. We can express
P(A) in the form {A
1
, A
2
,., A
n
} where each A
i
represents a subset of the set A. P(B) can similarly
be expressed as {B
1
, B
2
,., B
n}
where each B
j
represents a subset of B. Note that both P(B) and
P(A) have the same cardinality since they are equal. Since P(A) = P(B) it is the case that each A
i
corresponds to exactly one B
j
in P(B). It follows that