MATH 2820

Problem Set 3

1. You might consider using wolframalpha.com and factorial notation for the following.
(a) Consider a group of 30 randomly selected students. What is the probability that two of them
have the same birthday? Assume that there are 365 possible birthdays (sorry, Leap Day babies),
that they occur equally likely in the population, and that the birthdays of two randomly selected
students are independent of each other.
(b) Consider a group of 100 randomly selected students (thats as big as our class). What is the
probability that two of them have the same birthday? Same assumptions.

2. From a group of 20 students, 8 of whom are computer science majors and 12 of whom are electrical
engineering majors, one student is selected at random, and then a second student is selected at random
from the remaining 19 students. Let A be the event that the first student is a computer science major,
and let B be the event that the second student is a computer science majors.
(a) Prove that A and B are dependent events.
(b) Calculate P (A) and P (B).

3. An experimental search-and-rescue robot is designed to autonomously explore buildings toppled by

earthquakes to look for survivors. On a controlled test run, the robot has a 60% chance of successfully
locating a crash-test dummy, assuming a key navigational system remains functional. Theres a 15%
chance that navigational system will malfunction, in which case the chance of successfully locating the
crash-test dummy drops to 20%.
(a) What is the robots overall probability of successfully locating the crash-test dummy?
(b) If the robot successfully locates the crash-test dummy, what is the probability that the navigational
system malfunctioned?

4. Exercise 50, parts (d), (e), and (f), in Section 2.4 in your textbook, the one about shirts
5. Exercise 54 in Section 2.4 in your textbook, the one about awarded projects
6. Exercise 60 in Section 2.4 in your textbook, the one about batches of components
7. Suppose that in a sushi-themed card game, 10% of the cards are labeled tempura.
(a) Suppose the deck of cards in this game has 20 cards, so that .10 20 = 2 of them are tempura
cards. Draw two cards, one after the other. (That is, dont put the first card drawn back in the
deck before drawing the second one.) Let A = the first card drawn is a tempura card, and let
B = the second card drawn is a tempura card. Compute P (A), P (B), and P (A B). Are A and
B independent?
(b) Suppose the deck of cards in this game has 2000 cards, so that .10 2000 = 200 of them are
tempura cards. Using the same events as in part (a), compute P (A), P (B), and P (A B). Are
A and B independent?

(c) We know that if A and B are independent, then P (AB) = P (A)P (B), which can make calculating P (AB) relatively easy. Given your answers to parts (a) and (b), what recommendation would
you make about assuming independence for the purposes of calculating P (A B) in problems like
this one?
8. Following are two stacked bar charts generated from ecological footprint data.

(a) What is the difference between the two charts? (You might need to look at the footprint data
from Problem Set 1 to answer this question.)
(b) What does each chart convey about the data that the other one does not?

Built.up.Land
Carbon.Footprint
Fishing.Ground.Footprint
6

Forest.Footprint
Grazing.Footprint

Cropland.Footprint

Denmark

Estonia

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

Hungary

400

Chart #1

Built.up.Land
Carbon.Footprint
Fishing.Ground.Footprint

300

Forest.Footprint
Grazing.Footprint

100

200

Cropland.Footprint

Denmark

Chart #2

Estonia

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

Hungary