PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS

1. Assuming that half the population is vegetarian so that the chance

of an individual being a vegetarian is ½ and assuming that 100
investigators can take sample of 10 individuals to see whether they
are vegetarians, how many investigators would you expect to
report that three people or less were vegetarians?

2. If the probability of defective bolts is 0.1, find (a) the mean and
standard deviation for the distribution of defective bolts in a total of
500, and (b) the moment coefficient of skewness and kurtosis of
the distribution.

3. The incidence of a certain disease is such that on the average 20%

of workers suffer from it. If 10 workers are selected at random,
find the probability that

(i) Exactly 2 workers suffer from the disease.

(ii) Not more than 2 workers suffer from the disease.
Calculate the probability upto fourth decimal place.

4. Eight coins are tossed at a time 256 times. Number of heads

observed at each throw is recorded and the results are given below.
Find the expected frequencies. What are the theoretical values of
mean and standard deviation? Calculate also the mean and S.D. of
the observed frequencies.

No. of heads at a 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
throw
Frequency 2 6 30 52 67 56 32 10 1

5. The following data show the number of seeds germinating out of 10

on damp filter for 80 set of seeds. Fit a binomial distribution to this
data:

X 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Y 6 20 28 12 8 6 0 0 0 0 0

6. Suppose on an average 1 house in 1000 in a certain district has a

fire during a year. If there are 2000 houses in that district, what is
the probability that exactly 5 houses will have a fire during the
year?
 7. Ten per cent of the tools produced in a certain manufacturing
process turn out to be defective. Find the probability that in a
sample of 10 tools chosen at random, exactly two will be defective
by using
(a) the binomial distribution
(b) the Poisson approximation to the binomial distribution.

8. The following mistakes per page were observed in a book:

No. of mistakes per

0 1 2 3 4
page
NO. of times the
211 90 19 5 0
mistake occurred
Fit a Poisson distribution to fit data.
9. Suppose that a manufactured product has 2 defects per unit of
product inspected. Using Poisson distribution, calculate the
probabilities of finding a product without any defect, 3 defects and
4 defects. (Given e-2=0.135)

10. The number of defects per unit in a sample of 330 units of

manufactured product was found as follows:

No. of defects 0 1 2 3 4
No. of Units 214 92 20 3 1
Fit a poisson distribution to the data and test for goodness of fit.
(Given e-0.439=0.6447)

NORMAL CURVE

11. Find the area under the normal curve for z=1.54

12. Find the area to the left of z=1.96

13. A normal curve has X = 20 and σ = 10 . Find the area between
x1=15 and x2=40
14. Assume the mean height of soldiers to be 68.22 inches with a
variance of 10.8 inches. How many soldiers in a regiment of 1000
would you expect is be over six feet tall?
15. In a distribution exactly normal, 7% of the items are under 35 and
79% are under 63. What is the mean and standard deviation of the
distribution?
16. A grinding machine is so set that its production of shafts has an
average diameter of 10.10 cms and a standard deviation of 0.20
cm. The product specifications call for shaft diameters between
 10.05 cm. and 10.20 cm. What proportion of output meets the
specifications presuming normal distribution?
18. 1000 light bulbs with a mean life of 120 days are installed in new
factory; their length of life is normally distributed with standard
deviation 20 days (i) How many bulbs will expire in less than 90
days ? (ii) If it is decided to replace all the bulbs together, what
intervals should be allowed between replacements if not more than
10 percent should expire before replacement?
19. The Bombay Municipal corporation installed 2000 bulbs in the
streets of Bombay. If these bulbs have an average life of 1000
burning hours, with a standard deviation of 200 hours, what
number of bulbs might be expected to fail in the first 700 burning
hours? The table of area of the normal curve at selected values is
as follows:

X−X
Probability
σ
1.00 0.159
12.5 0.106
1.50 0.067
20. As a result of test on 20000 electric bulbs manufactured by a
company it was found that the lifetime of the bulb was normally
distributed with an average life of 2040 hours and standard
deviation of 60 hours. On the basis of the information estimate the
number of the bulbs that are expected to burn for (a) more than
2150 hours, and (b) less than 1960 hours.

Proportion of Area under the normal Curve

z 1.23 1.63 1.33 1.73 1.43 1.83

Area 0.3907 0.4484 0.4082 0.4582 0.4236 0.4664

21. a. 15000 students appeared for an examination. The mean marks

were 49 and the standard deviation of marks was 6. Assuming
the marks to be normally distributed, what proportion of
students scored more than 55 marks?
b. If in the same examination, Grade ‘A’ is to be given students
scoring more than 70 marks what proportion of the students will
receive Grade ‘A’ ?