Exercise sheet 4, Exercise 1

GEM2900 - Understanding Uncertainty and

Statistical Thinking
David Chew and David Nott
Department of Statistics and Applied Probability
National University of Singapore

Exercise sheet 4, Exercise 1

(b)
Standard error =

(1 p

p
=
n

(a) Based on this sample, what is your best estimate of the

proportion of freshmen taking GEM2900?
(b) Compute and explain a measure of the reliability of this
estimate.

Exercise sheet 4, Exercise 2

(a) The proportion of freshment taking GEM2900 in the

= 12/60 = 0.2.
sample is a reasonable estimate, namely p
r

There are 500 students taking GEM2900 this semester.

Someone taking GEM2900 is trying to estimate the proportion
of 1st year students (freshmen) in the class. A random sample
of 60 students was drawn and 12 students were freshmen.

0.2 0.8
0.0516
60

This standard error is an estimate of the standard deviation

(considered as a random variable that
of the estimator p
varies between samples).

Assume the midterm exam for GEM2900 includes 100 multiple

choice questions with five possible responses to each question.
Suppose a student did not study and decided to guess the
answer for all questions in a completely random fashion.
(a) What is the expected number of questions that the student
guesses correctly?
(b) What is the standard deviation of the number of questions
that the student guesses correctly?

Exercise sheet 4, Exercise 2

(a) The number of correct guesses X is a binomial random
variable Bin(n, p) where n = 100 and p = 1/5. For a
binomial random variable you know that E(X ) = np. So the
expected number of guesses correct is
np = 100 1/5 = 20.
(b) Again considering the number of correct guesses X as a
binomial random variable with parameters n and p we have
that the variance of X is Var(X ) = np(1 p). Hence the
standard deviation is the square root of this,
r
p
1 4
sd(X ) = np(1 p) = 100 = 4
5 5

Exercise sheet 4, Exercise 3

1. Assuming your friend has no ability to read minds, his

chance of guessing any flip correct is 0.5, independently
for each of the flips. Hence the number of guesses correct
X is binomial, X Binomial(5,0.5).

2. The probability of 5 guesses correct is

5
1
.
P(X = 5) = 12 = 32

Exercise sheet 4, Exercise 3

A friend of yours claims to have the ability to read your mind.

He asks you to flip a fair coin 5 times without showing him the
result, recording the sequence of coin flips on a piece of paper
(again without showing him the sequence). Then he asks you to
concentrate on the sequence on the piece of paper and he will
be able to tell you what the sequence is by reading your mind.
(a) If we assume that your friend has no mind reading ability
and that he is just guessing, what is the distribution of the
number of correct guesses out of 5?
(b) What is the probability that all 5 guesses will be correct?

Exercise sheet 4, Exercise 4

After playing the game in exercise 3 above with you your friend
failed to correctly predict all 5 coin tosses. He continues to
insist that he can read your mind, claiming that he wasnt
warmed up" yet. He suggests that you play the game with him
10 more times (that is, you generate 10 more sequences of 5
coin tosses where for each sequence he must guess the result
of all 5 tosses correctly).
What is the chance that he will guess all 5 tosses correctly on
at least one of the 10 occasions?

Exercise sheet 4, Exercise 4

Exercise sheet 4, Exercise 5

Let Ai be the event of failing to win on game i, i = 1, ..., 10. Let

A be the event of failing to win on all 10 occurrences. From the
last exercise we know that P(Ai ) = 31/32. Then
P(A) = P(10
i=1 Ai )
=

10
Y

P(Ai )

i=1

31
32

and
= 1 P(A) = 1
P(A)

10

31
32

10

0.27.

Exercise sheet 4, Exercise 5

We can think of the event of a correct match as a rare event,
and apply the law of rare events. The chance of a match for
one particular answer book is 1/500 if the cover sheets and
answers are paired randomly. With 500 answer books, the
expected number of matches is 500 1/500 = 1.
The number of matches should approximately follow a Poisson
distribution with mean 1 if the law of rare events holds. Hence
the probability of no match is the probability of zero for a
Poisson random variable with mean 1, which is exp(1).
Hence the probability of one or more correct match is
1 exp(1) 0.632.

A lecturer administers an exam to his class of 500 GEM2900

students. He drops all the exams on the floor so that the
answer booklets and the cover sheets identifying the students
are separated, so that he has no way of knowing which student
submitted which answer booklet. He decides to pair up the
answer books and cover sheets randomly.
What is the (approximate) probability that at least one student
gets assigned their correct mark (that is, what is the chance
that at least one cover sheet and answer booklet are correctly
matched)?