Math 35
A Survey of Mathematical Thought
Summer 2006
Assignment 1
Due Friday, June 30, at the beginning of class.
Chapter 13 exercises, p. 296, #1-5. Be sure to
show your work and justify your answers for full points - a correct
answer with no justification shown will not receive full credit.
There are four points available for each question, so
20 is a perfect score on this assignment.
Recall the following basic definitions from
class:
Experiment: An action or phenomenon with a
random result.
Examples: Flipping a coin, throwing a die,
drawing a card from a deck.
Outcome: A single possible result of an
experiment.
Examples: The coin landing "heads", the die
showing "4", drawing the queen of spades.
Sample space: The set of all possible
outcomes of an experiment.
Examples: For flipping a coin, the sample
space is {heads, tails}. For rolling a die, the sample space is
{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}. For drawing a card, the sample space has 52
different elements, one for each card in the deck.
Event: A subset of the sample space; a
collection of some (or all) of the possible outcomes.
Examples: Rolling an even number - {2, 4,
6}. Beating a roll of 2 - {3, 4, 5, 6}
Recall also the basic formula of probability: If all the
outcomes in the sample space are equally likely, then the
probability of an event E occurring is given by
p(E) = n(E)/n(S)
where p(E) is the probability of the event occurring, n(E) is the
number of outcomes which yield the event E, and n(S) is the number of
total outcomes in the sample space. Put another way, the formula
states that the probability of an event occurring is equal to the
number of favourable outcomes divided by the total number of possible
outcomes.
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