DATAENG EXAMPLE PROBLEMS

1. A die is tossed 6 times. What is the probability that no fives will turn up? What is the probability that
four fives will turn up? 0.335, 𝟖. 𝟎𝟒𝒙𝟏𝟎−𝟑

2. A manufacturer of metal pistons finds that on the average, \12% of his pistons are rejected because
they are either oversize or undersize. What is the probability that a batch of 10 pistons will contain no
more than 2 rejects? At least two rejects? 0.89131, 0.34173

3. Vehicles pass through a junction on a busy road at an average rate of 300 per hour. Find the
probability that none passes in a given minute. What is the expected number of vehicles passing in two
minutes? Find the probability that this expected number actually pass through in a given two-minute
period. 𝟔. 𝟕𝟒𝒙𝟏𝟎−𝟑 , 𝟏𝟎, 𝟎. 𝟏𝟐𝟓𝟏𝟏

4. The ratio of boys to girls at birth in China is quite high at 1.15:1. What proportion of Chinese families
with exactly 6 children will have at least 2 boys? 𝟎. 𝟗𝟐

5. A life insurance salesman from Moon Life sells on the average 3 life insurance policies per week.
Calculate the probability that in a given day he will sell some policies. 0.35

6. It was found that the mean length of 100 parts produced by a lathe was 20.05 mm with a standard
deviation of 0.02 mm. Find the probability that a part selected at random would have a length between
20.06 mm and 20.07 mm. What is the probability that the length of the part is longer than 20.09 mm?
𝟎. 𝟏𝟓, . 𝟎𝟐𝟐𝟖

7. Suppose that a bottle filling machine operates so that ounces of fill have a mean equal to the dial
setting for “amount of liquid” but have a standard deviation of 1.5 ounces. Find the proper setting for
the dial so that 17-ounce bottles will overflow only 2.5% of the time. Assume that the amounts
dispensed have a normal distribution. 14.06

8. A sugar refinery has three processing plants, all receiving raw sugar in bulk. The amount of raw sugar
(in tons) that one plant can process in one day can be modeled using an exponential distribution with
mean of 5 tons for each of three plants. If each plant operates independently, find the probability that
exactly two of the three plants process more than 8 tons of raw sugar on a given day? 0.0976

9. Let X denote the time between detections of a particle with a Geiger counter and assume that X has
an exponential distribution with E(X) = 1.4 minutes. Determine the probability that a particle is detected
within 30 seconds of starting the counter? 𝟎. 𝟑

10. Suppose that random variables X, Y, and Z have the joint probability density function 𝑓(𝑥, 𝑦, 𝑧) =
8𝑥𝑦𝑧 for 0<x<1, 0<y<1, 0<z<1. Determine 𝑃(𝑋 < 0.5), 𝑃(𝑋 < 0.5, 𝑌 < 0.5 | 𝑍 = 0.8), 𝐸(𝑋). 0.25,
0.0625, 2/3