THIAGARAJAR COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

(A Govt. Aided Autonomous Institution Affiliated to Anna University)

Department of Mathematics
22CS310 – Probability and Statistics
Application Assignment -I
Assignment Date: 14.09.2023 Due date: 22.09.2023

1. Suppose an individual is randomly selected from the population of all adult males living in
the United States. Let A be the event that the selected individual is over 6 ft in height, and let
B be the event that the selected individual is a professional basketball player. Which do you
think is larger, P(A/B) or P(B/A)? Why?
2. Classify the following random variables as discrete or continuous:
X: the number of automobile accidents per year in Virginia.
Y : the length of time to play 18 holes of golf.
M: the amount of milk produced yearly by a particular cow.
N: the number of eggs laid each month by a hen.
P: the number of building permits issued each month in a certain city.
Q: the weight of grain produced per acre.
3. A friend who lives in Los Angeles makes frequent consulting trips to Washington, D.C.; 50%
of the time she travels on airline #1, 30% of the time on airline #2, and the remaining 20% of
the time on airline #3. For airline #1, flights are late into D.C. 30% of the time and late into
L.A. 10% of the time. For airline #2, these percentages are 25% and 20%, whereas for airline
#3 the percentages are 40% and 25%. If we learn that on a particular trip she arrived late at
exactly one of the two destinations, what are the posterior probabilities of having flown on
airlines #1, #2, and #3? Assume that the chance of a late arrival in L.A. is unaffected by what
happens on the flight to D.C.
4. A chain of video stores sells three different brands of DVD players. Of its DVD player sales,
50% are brand 1 (the least expensive), 30% are brand 2, and 20% are brand 3. Each
manufacturer offers a 1-year warranty on parts and labour. It is known that 25% of brand 1’s
DVD players require warranty repair work, whereas the corresponding percentages for brands
2 and 3 are 20% and 10%, respectively.
a) What is the probability that a randomly selected purchaser has bought a brand 1 DVD
player that will need repair while under warranty?
b) What is the probability that a randomly selected purchaser has a DVD player that will
need repair while under warranty?
c) If a customer returns to the store with a DVD player that needs warranty repair work,
what is the probability that it is a brand 1 DVD player? A brand 2 DVD player? A brand
3 DVD player?
5. Many manufacturers have quality control programs that include inspection of incoming
materials for defects. Suppose a computer manufacturer receives computer boards in lots of
five. Two boards are selected from each lot for inspection. We can represent possible outcomes
of the selection process by pairs. For example, the pair (1, 2) represents the selection of boards
1 and 2 for inspection.
a. List the ten different possible outcomes.
b. Suppose that boards 1 and 2 are the only defective boards in a lot of five. Two boards
are to be chosen at random. Define X to be the number of defective boards observed
among those inspected. Find the probability distribution of X.
c. Let F(x) denote the cdf of X. First determine F(0), F(1), and F(2); then obtain F(x) for
all other x.

6. The weekly demand for propane gas (in 1000s of gallons) from a particular facility is an rv X
1
(1 − 2 ) 1≤ 𝑥≤2
with pdf f(x) = { 𝑥 }
0 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑤𝑖𝑠𝑒
a. Compute the cdf of X.
b. Compute E(X) and V(X).
c. If 1.5 thousand gallons are in stock at the beginning of the week and no new supply is due
In during the week, how much of the 1.5 thousand gallons is expected to benefit at the
end of the week? [Hint: Let amount left when demand 5x]

7. An electronics store sells a particular model of a laptop computer. There is only four
laptops in stock, and the manager wonders what today’s demand for this particular
model will be. She learns from the marketing department that the probability distribution
for x, the daily demand for the laptop, is as shown in the table.

x 0 1 2 3 4 5
p(x) .10 .40 20 .15 .10 .05

Find the mean, variance, and standard deviation of x. Is it likely that five or more customers
will want to buy the laptop today?

8. The experiment consists of a sequence of n trials, where n is fixed in advance of the

9. A company that produces fine crystal knows from experience that 10% of its goblets have
cosmetic flaws and must be classified as “seconds.”
a. Among six randomly selected goblets, how likely is it that only one is a second?
b. Among six randomly selected goblets, what is the probability that at least two are
seconds?
c. If goblets are examined one by one, what is the probability that at most five must be
selected to find four that are not seconds?
10. A manufacturer of integrated circuit chips wishes to control the quality of its product by
rejecting any batch in which the proportion of defective chips is too high. To this end, out of
each batch (10,000 chips), 25 will be selected and tested. If at least 5 of these 25 are
defective, the entire batch will be rejected.
a. What is the probability that a batch will be rejected if 5% of the chips in the batch are in
fact defective?
b. Answer the question posed in (a) if the percentage of defective chips in the batch is 10%.
c. Answer the question posed in (a) if the percentage of defective chips in the batch is 20%.
d. What happens (increase or decrease) to the probabilities in (a)–(c) if the critical rejection
number is increased from 5 to 6?

11. Three brothers and their wives decide to have children until each family has two female
children. What is the pmf of X = the total number of male children born to the brothers?
What is E(X), and how does it compare to the expected number of male children born to
each brother?

12. Suppose that p = P (male birth) = .5 A couple wishes to have exactly two female children in
their family. They will have children until this condition is fulfilled.
a. What is the probability that the family has x male children?
b. What is the probability that the family has four children?
c. What is the probability that the family has at most four children?
d. How many male children would you expect this family to have? How many children would
you expect this family to have?

13. Suppose that the number of drivers who travel between a particular origin and destination
during a designated time period has a Poisson distribution with parameter 𝜆 = 20
(suggested in the article “Dynamic Ride Sharing: Theory and Practice,” J. of Transp. Engr.,
1997: 308–312). What is the probability that the number of driver’s will
a. Be at most 10?
b. Exceed 20?
c. Be between 10 and 20, inclusive? Be strictly between 10 and 20?
d. Be within 2 standard deviations of the mean value?

14. In proof testing of circuit boards, the probability that any particular diode will fail is .01.
Suppose a circuit board contains 200 diodes.
a. How many diodes would you expect to fail, and what is the standard deviation of the
number that are expected to fail?
b. What is the (approximate) probability that at least four diodes will fail on a randomly
selected board?
c. If five boards are shipped to a particular customer, how likely is it that at least four of
them will work properly? (A board works properly only if all its diodes work.)

15. Let X denote the distance (m) that an animal moves from its birth site to the first territorial
vacancy it encounters. Suppose that for banner-tailed kangaroo rats, X has an exponential
distribution with parameter 𝜆= .01386 (as suggested in the article “Competition and
Dispersal from Multiple Nests,” Ecology, 1997: 873–883).
a. What is the probability that the distance is at most 100 m? At most 200 m? Between 100
and 200 m?
b. What is the probability that distance exceeds the mean distance by more than 2 standard
deviations?
c. What is the value of the median distance?
16. Data collected at Toronto Pearson International Airport suggests that an exponential
distribution with mean value 2.725 hours is a good model for rainfall duration (Urban
StormwaterManagement Planning with Analytical Probabilistic Models,2000, p. 69).
a. What is the probability that the duration of a particular rainfall event at this location is at
least 2 hours? At most3 hours? Between 2 and 3 hours?
b. What is the probability that rainfall duration exceeds the mean value by more than 2
standard deviations? What is the probability that it is less than the mean value by more than
one standard deviation?

17. Suppose the time spent by a randomly selected student who uses a terminal connected to a
local time-sharing computer facility has a gamma distribution with mean 20 min and
variance 80 min2.
1
a. What are the values of α and β ? where 𝛽 = .
𝜆
b. What is the probability that a student uses the terminal for at most 24 min?
c. What is the probability that a student spends between 20 and 40 min using the
terminal?

18. Calls to a telephone system follow a Poisson distribution with a mean of five calls per
minute.
(a) What is the name applied to the distribution and parameter values of the time until the
tenth call?
(b) What is the mean time until the tenth call?
(c) What is the mean time between the ninth and tenth calls?