If a certain coin is flipped, the probability that the coin will land

We want the probability that coin will land heads up on the first 3 flips and not on the last 2 flips. So there is ONLY one favorable outcome, namely heads up on the first 3 flips and tails up on the last 2 flips: HHHTT.

# of total out comes is 2^5=32.

P=favorable/total=1/32.

Answer: E.

IF THE QUESTION WERE:
A certain coin is flipped, the probability that the coin will land heads is 1/2. If the coin is flipped 5 times, what is the probability that it will land heads up on 3 flips and not on heads up on 2 flips? (so without fixing order of occurrences of heads and tails)

Then the answer would be: \(P=\frac{5!}{3!2!}*(\frac{1}{2})^3*(\frac{1}{2})^2=\frac{10}{32}\), since in this case the winning scenario of HHHTT can occur in many ways: HHHTTT, HTHHT, HTTHH, ... which basically is # of permutations of 5 letters out of which 3 H's and 2 T's are identical, so \(\frac{5!}{3!2!}\).

As you can see the probability of the event for modified question is 10 times higher that the probability of the event for the initial question, and that's because # of favorable outcomes is 10 for modified question and 1 for initial question.

Hope it's clear.