MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS Tutorial Exercises 1

Exercises which are taken from the text book, Wackerly, D.D. et.al. Mathematical
Statistics with Applications are marked with their exercise number in the textbook
in brackets.
1. A discrete random variable X has a distribution specified as follows.

X P (X = x)

0 0.3
1 0.4
2 0.3

Find the mean and variance of X.

[3.6] 2. Five balls, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, are place in an urn. Two balls
are randomly selected from the five, and their numbers noted. Find the
probability distribution of the larger of the two sampled numbers and of the
sum of the two sampled numbers.
[3.20] 3. A manufacturing company ships its products in two different sizes of truck
trailers. Each shipment is made in a trailer with dimensions 8ft x 10ft x 30ft
or 8ft x 10ft x 40ft. If 30% of its shipments are made by using 30–foot trailers
and 70% by using 40–foot trailers, find the mean volume shipped per trailer
load. (Assume that the trailers are always full.)
[3.71b] 4. Let Y denote a geometric random variable with probability of success P . Show
that for positive integers a and b,

P (Y > a + b|Y > a) = q b = P (Y > b).

[3.130] 5. A parking lot has two entrances. Cars arrive at entrance I according to
a Poisson distribution at an average of three per hour and at entrance II
according to a Poisson distribution at an average of four per hour. What is
the probability that a total of three cars will arrive at the parking lot in a
given hour? (Assume that the number of cars arriving at the two entrances
are independent.)
6. A discrete random variable X has probability generating function

Π(s) = e7s−7 .

Find the mean and variance of X.