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Summary Sheet: Probability: 4 1 P (Total 5) 16 4

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23 views

Summary Sheet: Probability: 4 1 P (Total 5) 16 4

Uploaded by

Raunak Prasad
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Summary sheet: Probability

M1 Understand and use mutually exclusive and independent events when calculating
probabilities
Link to discrete and continuous distributions
N1 Understand and use simple, discrete probability distributions (calculation of mean and
variance of discrete random variables is excluded), as a model

Calculating probabilities
In probability, the word experiment, or trial, is any situation involving uncertainty.
An outcome is the result of a trial or experiment.
The set of all possible outcomes of a trial or experiment is called the sample space.
The word event can be used to describe one or more possible outcomes from a trial or experiment.

If all the possible outcomes are equally likely, then the probability of event A can be calculated.
So, for example, an experiment could be tossing a coin twice, and the outcome is the result of the coin
tosses.
The sample space for this experiment is HH, HT, TH, TT.
If event A is ‘getting one head and one tail’ then the probability of A is given by P( A)  24  12 .

Sometimes a table is useful for finding a sample space. For example, if you spin two four-sided spinners,
each numbered 1 – 4, you could use a table like this to find the totals of the two spinners:
Spinner 1
1 2 3 4
1 2 3 4 5
2 3 4 5 6
Spinner 2
3 4 5 6 7
4 5 6 7 8
From the table, you can see that there are 16 possible outcomes. The total 5 occurs 4 times,
4 1
So P(total  5)   .
16 4

Expected frequency
If you spin the two spinners (above) 100 times, the expected frequency of getting a total of 5 is
100  14  25 . This does not mean that you would always get 25 instances where the total is 5, out of 100
spins!

Notation
 P( A) means ‘the probability that event A occurs’.
 A means ‘the complement of event A’, i.e. event A does not occur.
So P( A)  1  P( A) .
 P( A  B) means ‘the probability that either event A occurs, or event B occurs (or both)’.
 P( A  B) means ‘the probability that both event A and event B occur’.

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Summary sheet: Probability

Mutually exclusive events


Two events are mutually exclusive if it is impossible for them to occur together.
For example, if you throw two ordinary dice, and A is the event that the total of the dice is 8, and B is
the event that one of the dice shows a 1, then A and B are mutually exclusive events, since if B occurs
then to get a total of 8, the other dice would have to show a 7 which is not possible.

If two events are mutually exclusive, then


P( A  B)  P( A)  P( B)

Independent events
Two events A and B are independent if whether or not A occurs has no effect on whether or not B
occurs.

For example, if you toss a coin twice, then the outcomes of the two coin tosses are independent.
However, if you have a bag containing 6 red balls and 4 black balls, and you take a ball out and then take
another one out, the outcome of the second experiment depends on the result of the first, as the
probabilities are different according to the outcome of the first experiment.

If events A and B are independent, then


P( A  B)  P( A)  P( B)

Using diagrams
When you are working with more than one event, a diagram may help to work out probabilities.

 Tree diagram
This is useful when you are dealing with events that have just two or three possible outcomes,
such as tossing a coin. The tree diagram below shows the outcomes when a biased coin
(probability of getting a head is 0.6) is tossed twice.
0.6 H P(HH) = 0.6  0.6 = 0.36
H
0.6 0.4 T P(HT) = 0.6  0.4 = 0.24

0.6 H P(TH) = 0.4  0.6 = 0.24


0.4
T
0.4 T P(TT) = 0.4  0.4 = 0.16

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Summary sheet: Probability

 Venn diagram
This is useful when you are dealing with events that are not mutually exclusive. The Venn
diagram below shows the number of students taking Maths and / or English in a sixth form
college.
38 students take
Maths English English but not Maths

47 22 38
There are 16 students
taking neither subject

16
22 students take
both subjects

Probability distributions
A random variable has a number (which may be infinite) of possible values, each of which has an
associated probability. All the probabilities must add up to 1.
The probability distribution of a random variable gives the probability of each of the possible outcomes.

If X is the result of spinning two four-sided spinners, each numbered 1 – 4, the probability distribution of
X could be written in a table like this:

x 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 1 3 1 3 1 1
P(X = x)
16 8 16 4 16 8 16

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