Tutorial Sheet-1

1. Urn A contains two white and two black balls; urn B contains three white and two
black balls. One ball is transferred from A to B; one ball is then drawn from B, and
turns out to be white. What is the probability that the transferred ball is white?

2. Which of the following events has the highest probability?

(a) At least one 6 appears when 6 fair dice are rolled.

(b) At least two 6’s appear when 12 fair dice are rolled.
(c) At least three 6’s appear when 18 fair dice are rolled.

3. Consider a group of n people. If everyone shakes hands with everyone else, how many
handshakes take place?

4. Suppose that A and B are mutually exclusive events for which P (A) = 0.3 and P (B) =
0.5. What is the probability that

(a) either A or B occurs?

(b) A occurs but B does not occur?
(c) both A and B occur?

5. Sixty percent of the students at a certain school wear neither a ring nor a necklace.
Twenty percent wear a ring and thirty percent wear necklace. If one of the students is
chosen randomly, what is the probability that this student is wearing

(a) a ring or a necklace?

(b) a ring and a necklace?

6. Assume 365 days in a year and all days are equally likely. What is the probability that
at least two out of k people have the same birthday? What is the minimum value of k
for which this probability is grater than 1/2?

7. A die is thrown as long as necessary for a six to turn up. Given that the six does not
turn up at the first throw, what is the probability that more than four throws will be
necessary?

8. If 8 identical blackboards are to be distributed among 4 schools, how many divisions

are possible? How many, if each school must receive at least one black board?

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 9. A production process involves three machines A, B and C, which produce 50%, 30%
and 20% respectively, of the total output. Out of the items produced by machine A,
10% fail in a quality control test. The corresponding figures for machines B and C
are 20% and 30%, respectively. All items passing the quality control test are directly
acceptable. On the other hand, items failing in the quality control test are further
processed and thus 40%, 50% and 60% of them turn out to be marginally acceptable,
depending on whether they came from machines A, B and C, respectively, e.g., out of
the items, that are produced by machine A and that fail in the quality control test,
40% eventually turn out to be marginally acceptable, and so on.

(a) Find the probability that a randomly chosen item from the production process is
found to be directly acceptable.
(b) Find the probability that a randomly chosen item from the production process
turns out to be marginally acceptable.
(c) Given that a randomly chosen item from the production process has failed in the
quality control test, what is the conditional probability that it turns out to be
marginally acceptable?
(d) Given that a randomly chosen item from the production process has turned out to
be marginally acceptable, what is the conditional probability that it was produced
by machine A?
(e) Given that a randomly chosen item was not produced by machine B, what is the
conditional probability that it turns out to be marginally acceptable?

10. A bag contains one marble which is either green or blue, with equal probabilities.
A green marble is put in the bag (so there are 2 marbles now), and then a random
marble is taken out. The marble taken out is green. What is the probability that the
remaining marble is also green?

11. An anti-aircraft gun can fire up to a maximum of four shots at an enemy plane moving
away from it. If the probabilities of hitting the plane at the first, second, third and
fourth shots are 0.4, 0.3, 0.2 and 0.1 respectively, what is the probability that the gun
is able to hit the plane ? Given that the plane is hit, what is the conditional probability
that at least three shots are needed for this purpose?

12. A diagnostic test for a certain disease is 95% accurate. Suppose that only 1% of
the population has the disease in question. A person is chosen at random from this

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 population. The test indicates that this person has the disease. What is the conditional
probability that he or she does have the disease?

13. Out of the valves produced by factory A, 10% are defectives and the corresponding
figure for factory B is 20%. A bag contains 4 valves of factory A and 5 valves of factory
B. If two valves are drawn at random from the bag, find the probability that at least
one valve is defective.

14. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), men who smoke
are 23 times more likely to develop lung cancer than men who don’t smoke. Also
according to the CDC, 20% of men in the U.S. smoke. What is the probability that a
man in the U.S. is a smoker, given that he develops lung cancer?

15. Consider the experiment of tossing two dice. Let A denote the event of an odd total,
B the event of getting one on the first die, and C the event of a total of seven. Then
we pose three problems:

• Are A, B and C pairwise independent?

• Are A, B and C independent?

16. Five percent of the people have high blood pressure. Of the people with high blood
pressure, seventy five percent drink alcohol; whereas, only fifty percent of the people
without high blood pressure drink alcohol. What percent of the drinkers have high
blood pressure?

17. The final round of the admission test for a management institute consists of three
components: (I) group discussion, (II) interview with practising managers, (III) inter-
view with the faculty of the institute. The city, where the test is held, is notorious for
traffic snarls. If a candidate is held up in a traffic jam on the way to the test venue,
he gets mentally disturbed and that can adversely affect his performance in the test.
In this case, his chances of being successful in (I), (II) and (III) are 0.3, 0.5 and 0.2
respectively. Otherwise, the corresponding chances are 0.6, 0.8 and 0.5 respectively.
The performances in (I), (II) and (III) in either case can be supposed to be mutually
independent. The chance that the candidate encounters a traffic jam on the way to
the test venue is 0.3.

(a) Given that the candidate did not encounter a traffic jam on the way to the test
venue, what is his conditional probability of being successful in at least two of the
three components of the test?

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 (b) Given that the candidate encountered a traffic jam on the way to the test venue,
what is his conditional probability of being successful in at least two of the three
components of the test?
(c) Given that the candidate was successful in at least two of the three components
of the test, what is the conditional probability that he did not encounter a traffic
jam on the way to the test venue?

18. Consider a well-shuffled deck of n cards, labeled 1 trough n. You flip over the cards
one by one, saying the numbers 1 through n as you do so. You win the game if, at
some point, the number you say aloud is the same as the number on the card being
flipped over (for example, if the 7th card in the deck has the label 7). What is the
probability of winning? [Hint: This is an equivalent form of the matching
problem discussed in the class]

19. A family has two children, and it is known that at least one is girl. What is the
probability that both are girls, given this information? What if it is known that the
elder child is a girl?

20. A and B throw alternatively with a pair of balanced dice. A wins if he throws a sum
of 6 points before B throws a sum of 7 points, while B wins if he throws a sum of 7
points before A throws a sum of 6 points. Suppose that A begins the game. What is
the probability that A will win the game?