Statistics 200 Honors

Homework Solutions
Solution Set 6: Due dates Oct. 6 { Oct. 7
A couple plans to have three children. There are 8 possible
arrangements of girls and boys. For example, GGB means the rst two children are girls and
the third child is a boy. All 8 arrangements are (approximately) equally likely.
(a) Write down all 8 arrangements of the sexes of three children. What is the probability of
any one of these arrangements?
The 8 arrangements are
GGG
GGB
GBG
GBB
BGG
BGB
BBG
BBB
Since the 8 arrangements are assumed equally likely, each occurs with probablity 1/8.
(b) Let X be the number of girls the couple has. What is the probability that X = 2?
If A is the event that X = 2, we see that A contains the three outcomes fGGB, GBG,
BGGg. Therefore, P (A) = 3=8.
(c) Starting from your work in (a), nd the distribution of X . That is, what values can X
take, and what are the probabilities for each value?
Here is the distribution of X , the number of girls, in the form of a table:
X
0 1 2 3
Probability 1/8 3/8 3/8 1/8
Page 322, exercise 4.38

Page 324, exercise 4.44 Let X be a random number between 0 and 1 produced by the
idealized uniform random number generator described in Example 4.17 and Figure 4.10.
Find the following probabilities:
(a) P (0  X  0:4)
The probability is the area under the density curve shown in Figure 4.10 between 0 and 0.4.
Since this area is simply the area of a rectangle with height equal to one, we simply nd the
width of the rectangle by subtracting 0 from 0.4. The desired probability is 0.4.
(b) P (0:4  X  1)
Using the same argument as in (a), the answer is 1 0:4 = 0:6.
(c) P (0:3  X  0:5)
Using the same argument as in (a), the answer is 0:5 0:3 = 0:2.
(d) P (0:3 < X < 0:5)
Because we are dealing with a continuous random variable, it does not matter whether we
include the endpoints since those points by themselves encompass an area of exactly zero.

Thus, the answer here is the same as the answer in (c), namely 0.2.
(e) P (0:226  X  0:713)
Using the same argument as in (a), the answer is 0:713 0:226 = 0:487.
Page 340, exercise 4.50 Keno

is a favorite game in casinos, and similar games are popular

with the states that operate lotteries. Balls numbered 1 to 80 are tumbled in a machine as the
bets are placed, then 20 of the balls are chosen at random. Players select numbers by marking
a card. The simplest of the many wagers available is \Mark 1 Number". Your payo is $3
on a $1 bet if the number you select is one of those chosen. Because 20 of 80 numbers are
chosen, your probability of winning is 20/80, or 0.25.
(a) What is the probability distribution (the outcomes and their probabilities) of the payo
X on a single play?
If we win, the payo is $3 and if we lose, the payo is $0. These are the only two possibilities
and we know their respective probabilities. Therefore, the probability distribution of X is
fully specied by saying P (X = 0) = 0:75 and P (X = 3) = 0:25.
(b) What is the mean payo X ?
To nd the mean of a discrete random variable like X , multiply each possible value by its
probability, then add all the results. In this case, we get

x = 0(0:75) + 3(0:25) = $0:75:

In the long run, how much does the casino keep from each dollar bet?
Since the mean payo for a dollar bet is 75 cents, the casino keeps 25 cents of every dollar
bet in the long run.
(c)

The baseball player Tony Gwynn gets a hit about 35% of the
time over an entire season. After he has failed to hit safely in six straight at-bats, the TV
commentator says, \Tony is due for a hit by the law of averages." Is that right? Why?
The statement is incorrect. The \law of averages" here is actually the law of large numbers,
which says only that in the long run, the proportion of at-bats in which Tony Gwynn gets
a hit is 0.35. However, this doesn't imply at all that a string of failures should be followed
by a string of successes. Instead, the law of large numbers implies that if you keep playing,
eventually those 6 failures will be insignicant because there will be so many other atbats. Remember this helpful quotation: \The law of large numbers overwhelms; it does not
compensate."
Page 342, exercise 4.58