Qm1a – Questions

Question 1

a) True or false: P(A∩B) ≤ minimum (P(A), P(B)). Justify your answer.

b) True or false: If E(X)>0, then X cannot take negative values. Justify your answer.
c) If X and Y are independent and normally distributed with the same mean but Var(X) =
2Var(Y), then compute P(X>Y).
d) The expected time taken to complete a task is 10 minutes and variance is 12 minutes. If
the time taken to complete the task is known to be uniformly distributed, what is the
probability that the task will be completed within 12 minutes?
e) The waiting time for an item of a certain product type to break down is believed to
follow an exponential distribution with mean = 10 days. You are monitoring two
independent items of the product. Given that both the items have not broken down in the
past 10 days and are still working, what is the probability that at least one of them will
break down within the next 5 days?

Question 2

A financial instrument is made up of five loans given to five different borrowers. If the
economy is not in recession, the defaults from different borrowers can be assumed to be
independent. In this case, the probability that any given borrower defaults on his loan
during a year is 20%. However, if the economy is under recession, all of the borrowers will
default with probability 1. Suppose that there is a 30% chance of a recession next year.

a) Given that the economy will not be in recession next year, what is the conditional
probability that exactly 2 borrowers will default?
b) What is the unconditional probability that no borrower defaults next year?
c) What is the unconditional probability that 4 or more borrowers will default next year?

Question 3

1
 3cm

20 30 50
2cm
1cm

Consider darts being thrown at the circular dart board given in the figure above which is
made of three concentric circles of radii 1cm, 2cm and 3cm respectively. The points you
obtain by hitting different regions of the board are as described in the figure (50, 30 and 20
respectively for the three regions). Assume it is impossible not to hit the board. Assume
further that the probability of hitting a region is proportional to its area. (Note: area of a
circle of radius r is π r2.)

a) Suppose X denotes the number of points scored in one throw. What is the distribution of
X?

b) Suppose Y is the maximum score in 10 independent throws. What is the distribution of

Y?

c) What is the expected number of hits to the innermost circle (i.e. where you score
50) in 10 independent throws?

d) Suppose that in 10 independent throws you have never hit the outermost ring (i.e.
where you score 20). In that case what is your expected score?

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Question 4

A factory has two machines, say machines A and B, which produce screws. The screws are
supposed to be 1cm (100mm) long but in reality the screws produced by machine A have
length uniformly distributed between 98mm and 102mm, and the screws produced by
machine B have length uniformly distributed between 97mm and 103mm. Suppose 60% of
the total production of screws in the factory is produced by machine A. A screw is
considered acceptable by a quality control process if its length is between 99cm and
101cm.

a) What is the average length of a screw given it is produced by Machine A? What is the
average length of a screw given it is produced by Machine B? What is the average length of
the screws produced by the factory?

b) What proportion of screws produced by the factory are acceptable by the quality control
process?

c) Suppose one screw produced by Machine A and another screw produced by Machine B
are randomly chosen. What the expected value of their difference of length? What is the
standard deviation of the difference of their length?

d) Suppose one screw produced by Machine A and another screw produced by Machine B
are randomly chosen. Suppose both of them were found to be acceptable by the quality
control process. What is the expected value of their difference of length?

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Question 5

A new educational institute campus that is being set up in India requires to plan the
number of trees of a particular species to be newly planted on the campus. Once the
campus is functional it will accommodate at most 1000 people. The institute is considering
two species of trees A and B.

A fully grown tree of species A is known to produce 5 people equivalent of oxygen per year
(1 person equivalent means the amount of oxygen needed by 1 person in a year). The
corresponding production rate for Species B is unknown.

For any species, only a percentage of newly planted trees are expected to survive and fully
grow. For species A, this survival rate is 95%. For species B, the survival rate is unknown.

No oxygen is produced by a tree that does not survive. Assume that the trees that survive
will be fully grown by the time the campus becomes functional.

Answer the following questions. Use CLT for parts (b) and (c).

a) What is the expected amount of oxygen (in people equivalents per year) from any
newly planted tree of species A? What is the standard deviation?

b) What is the probability that 215 newly planted trees of species A will result in enough
oxygen per year for 1000 people once the surviving trees are fully grown?

c) Based on a study, it was estimated that if 110 trees of species B were newly planted
then there was only a 38% chance of generating the amount of oxygen enough for 1000
people in a year once the surviving trees are fully grown. It was further found that if 115
trees of this species were planted then there was about 86% chance of generating the
amount of oxygen enough for 1000 people in a year once the surviving trees are fully
grown. What is the estimated oxygen production rate of this new species in terms of
person-equivalent of oxygen in a year? What proportion of this species will survive to grow
fully?

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Question 1:

A coin is tossed 3 times in a row independently. Let us assume that probability of heads = p
and probability of tails=1-p and that these probabilities do not change from one toss to
another toss.

a. Write down the sample space for the experiment and the probabilities for each
outcome.

We define the following random variables:

X= Number of heads minus number of tails.
Y= Minimum (number of heads, number of tails).

b. Write down the values taken by X and Y for each outcome in the sample space.
c. Write down the joint distribution of X and Y.
d. Write down the marginal distributions of X and Y.
e. If p=.5, what is Covariance (X,Y) ?
f. If p=.5, are X and Y independent?

Question 2:

A 6-faced die is independently thrown 10 times. Each throw leads to one of the outcomes viz. 1,
2, 3, 4, 5 or 6, depending on the face that shows up. In each throw, the occurrence of face 2 is
twice as likely as face 1, occurrence of face 3 is thrice as likely as face 1, and in general
occurrence of face i is i-times as likely as face 1, for i=2,3,4,5,6. Define the following random
variables:
X1 = value of the face that shows up in the first throw.
(For example, if face 2 shows up in the first throw, then X1=2. If face 6 shows up in the first
throw, then X1=6). Similarly, X2 = value of the face that shows up in the second throw. In
general, let Xj = value of the face that shows up in the jth throw, for j=1,2,…, 10. Let X= the sum
of the outcomes from the 10 independent throws of the die.
i.e., X= X1+ X2+ … +X10

a) Write down the p.m.f. for the random variable Xj.

b) What is E[Xj] and variance[Xj]
c) What is E[X] and Variance[X]?
d) What is P(X=10)?

Question 3:

A machine working continuously is repaired and brought to working condition each time it
fails. It is assumed that the machine is started immediately after every repair. The time till
failure after every repair is known to satisfy the memory-less property and hence is
exponentially distributed. It is known from past experience that there is a 50% chance that the
machine will fail within 20 hours of repair.

a) What is the expected time for the machine to fail?

 b) If it known that as of now the machine has already been working for 100 hours, what
is the expected time from now until the next failure?
c) After a repair what is the probability that it will work for at least 40 more hours?
d) If a new repairing technology is introduced that reduces the probability of failure
within 20 hours of repair to 25%, what would then be the average waiting time for
failure after the first repair ?

Question 4:

Suppose the consulate of country A receives on the average 10 applications for immigrant visa
from people in country B every day. If the number of applicants is 4 or less then everyone gets
the visa. If it is greater than 4, then only the first 4 applicants are given the visa and rest of
them are refused a visa. Making suitable assumptions find:

a) The probability that there is at least one visa-refusal on a randomly chosen day.
b) Average number of applicants receiving visa in a day.

Question 5:

An insurance company uses the following calculation to charge premiums (in rupees) to car
owners depending on the range of miles driven as of beginning of policy year. Suppose ‘x’
miles have been driven, then the premium charged 𝑃(x)is given by:

0.1 ∗ (10,000 − x) + 500 , if x < 10,000

𝑃(x) =
500 , if x ≥ 10,000
Suppose that the miles driven by any car insured by this company follows a uniform
distribution between 0 and 15,000.

a) What percentage of cars insured by the company pay a premium less than Rs. 1000?.
b) Given that a car paid premium less than Rs. 1000, what is the probability that it had
driven more than 10,000 miles?

Question 6:
The weekly salaries paid to employees of a small company that supplies part-time laborers is on
an average $500 with a standard deviation of $100. Assume that the distribution of weekly
salaries paid to employees of the company is approximately normally distributed.
a) What percentage of employees makes more than $400 per week?
b) What’s the 99th percentile of the weekly salary distribution?
c) If there is a 5% salary increase for the next year, what will be the distribution of weekly
salaries for next year?
Question 7:

A volunteer tourist guide at a heritage site in India does not charge a fee for her services.
However, she accepts tips provided by the tourists. For every tourist she guides, she receives
either a tip of 0 or 100 or 200 rupees with equal probabilities (i.e. =1/3). Assume that this is
her only source of income.

a) What is the expected value and standard deviation of income from each tourist?
b) If she guides 5000 tourists during a year, what is the expected value and standard
deviation of her total annual income?. Using Central Limit Theorem (CLT), find the
probability that her income during the year will be less than Rs. 5,15,000.
c) Suppose she wants to ensure that the probability of her income falling below 5,15,000
should be less than 5%. Using CLT, determine whether she can achieve this target by
planning to guide 5250 tourists?.
Question 1.
Answer the following questions by providing a brief justification for your answer.
a. “60% of MPs in the parliament voted in favour of bill A. 20% of MPs in the same
parliament voted in favour of bill B. This means at least 20% of the MPs neither favour
bill A nor favour bill B”. TRUE or FALSE? Explain.

b. “If A and B are disjoint (mutually exclusive) events with positive probability of
occurrence, then they must be independent”. TRUE or FALSE? Explain.

c. If X ~Binomial (n=5, p=.5) and Y~ Binomial (n=5, p=.2) are independent random
variables, find P(X+Y>0)

d. A bus is scheduled for departure at 8 AM. The arrival time of a passenger who wishes to
catch this bus is uniformly distributed between 7:30 am and 8 am. What is the expected
waiting time (in minutes) for the passenger from the time he arrives until the departure
of the bus?

e. The service time at a bank window is known to be exponentially distributed with mean
service time = 10 minutes. When Person A arrives, he is next in line to person B who is
currently still at the window and by then has already been served for the last 5 minutes.
Person A needs to wait until Person B is fully served. What is the expected waiting time
for person A ?

f. If the exam scores of a certain batch of students can be approximated by a normal

distribution with mean 75 and standard deviation 2.5. What score corresponds to the
99th percentile?

g. 5 out of a batch of 25 students in a management school wished to do an internship with a

major political party. That year, the political party randomly selected 3 different students
from these 25 students. What is the probability that 2 of these 3 happen to be among the
5 who wished to be interning with them?

h. A biased coin with probability of heads=1/4 is tossed independently until two successive
heads occur. Let X= number of tosses until and including the two successive heads. What
is P(X=4)?

i. For an exponential distribution with mean=2, 50thpercentile is more than 2.

TRUE or FALSE? Explain.
 j. A bag contains equal number of coins of two types, viz., type A and type B. For coin of type
A: P(heads)=1/4 and for type B: P(heads)=1/2. A coin was randomly picked up from the
bag and tossed once. Given that the toss resulted in heads, what is the probability that
the coin was of type A?

Question 2.
A company aims to sell as many CDs as possible over the next 30 days. There are two types of
CDs, viz (i) classical music and (ii) rock music. The company found from the past data that on a
randomly chosen day, the probability distribution of the number of music CDs sold of each type
is as shown below. The sales of CDs across different days and types are independent.

Number of Classical
Music CDs sold in a day 0 500 1000
Probability 0.1 0.2 0.7

Number of Rock
Music CDs sold in a
day 0 1000 2000
Probability 0.2 0.3 0.5

a. Find the probability distribution of the total number of music CDs (i.e. classical + rock)
sold on a randomly chosen day.

b. What is the expected value and standard deviation of the total number of CDs that will be
sold in the next 30 days?

c. Using Central Limit Theorem, find the probability that the company will be able to sell at
least 70000 CDs in the next 30 days?

Question 3.

Three students from a management school decided to appear for a job interview in a reputed
firm. The job interview had two levels, viz. I and II. A candidate moves to the second level (i.e.
level II) only if she passes the first level (i.e. level I). From past experience, it is known that for
a student in level I there is a 30% chance of passing and for a student entering level II there is a
10% chance of passing. For these three students who appear for the job interview, let X=
number of students who pass level I and Y = number of students who pass level II. Assume
students perform independently of each other in the interviews.

a. Find the probability distribution of X?

b. Find the joint distribution of X and Y.

c. Hence find the marginal distribution of Y.

Question 4.

Students from engineering and science colleges prepare over an extended period of several
years to appear for a competitive examination. A candidate can take up to five attempts to
qualify in the competitive exam. After each examination, the candidates are evaluated as either
qualified or failed. The outcomes from different attempts are independent for an individual and
also across individuals. Also, assume that the student sticks to the same mode of preparation
over different attempts. Relevant details on the different approaches students may take to
prepare are provided in the table below.

Probability of Percentage of students

Preparation Qualification in a taking this mode to
Mode given attempt prepare
1 Self Study 0.4 70%
2 Coaching Class 0.7 20%
Personalized
3 training 0.8 10%

a. What is the probability that a randomly chosen candidate qualifies in the 4 th attempt?

b. Given that a candidate qualified on the 4 th attempt, what is the probability that he
prepared by self-study?

Question 5.
Vipul Kapadia, the recently graduated MBA of WIMIWI was focussed on managing a project. The
project consists of four stages, viz. 1, 2, 3 and 4 in that order. Each stage starts immediately after
the previous stage is completed. Also, the times taken in different stages are independent of
each other.

The duration for individual stages are independent normal random variables with known
parameters

Stage 1: N(50, 25), Stage 2: N (75,16), Stage 3: N (25,9), Stage 4: N (100,64)

(The first number in parenthesis represents the average (or mean) and the second number
represents the variance of the normal distribution.)

a. What is the probability distribution of the random variable representing the Project
duration?

b. What is the probability that the project will be completed on or before 262 days?

c. The client would like the project to be completed on or before his target of 262 days.
There is a penalty of Rs. 75,000 for delay and a reward of Rs. 50,000 for
an early completion, irrespective of the time before or after the target of 262 days.
 Define: Gain = -75,000 in case of penalty and 50,000 in case of reward. What is the
Expected Gain for the project?

d. Vipul Kapadia has two options to deal with the project completion time. The details are
provided below. Vipul would like to use Expected Gain to decide on the options. The
target completion time remains the same i.e. 262 days.
Question 1
A game has 2 levels. A participant must win the first level in order to qualify for the second level.
If a participant wins at first level, she has the option to either “receive Rs.1 Lakh and quit the
game” OR “not receive any money and continue to the second level”. If the participant wins at
second level, she receives Rs.6 Lakhs. At any level, if the participant loses, she does not get any
money from the game.
The game for each participant ends as soon she loses a level, or chooses to quit, or when she
wins at the second level.
The chance of any random participant winning the first level is 20%. If a participant wins the
first level, then there is 40% chance that she decides to quit. If a participant plays the second
level, the chance of winning the second level is 5%.
Suppose large number of participants have queued up to play the game one after another, and
their performance is independent of each other. Answer the following questions.

a) Write down the probability distribution for the amount of money that any participant can
take away from the game.
b) Given that the first two participants have not taken away any money from the game, what
is the probability that the third participant will be the first to take away Rs. 6 lakhs from the
game?
c) Given that both of the first two participants took away at least Rs. 1 lakh from the game,
what is the probability that the third participant will be the first to take away Rs. 6 lakhs from
the game?
Question 2
A small fast food joint in a mall sells four beverages: Cappuccino, Americano, Iced Tea and
Lemonade. The price of the beverages is Rs. 100, Rs. 125, Rs. 75 and Rs. 50 respectively. The first
two are hot beverages and the last two are cold beverages.
Among the visitors to the shop, it is known that 60% buy a beverage, and the others do not.
Assume that the customers choose to buy or not to buy beverages independently, and if they buy
a beverage, that choice is also independent of the choice made by any other customer. No
customer buys more than one beverage.
If a customer buys a beverage, the chance that she chooses a hot beverage is 40%, and the
chance that she chooses a cold beverage is 60%. Choosing Cappuccino is thrice as likely
compared to Americano, while choosing iced tea and lemonade are equally likely.
Assume that one morning the shop gets 25 visitors. Let
X1: Number of visitors buying Cappuccino
X2: Number of visitors buying Americano
X3: Number of visitors buying Iced Tea and
X4: Number of visitors buying Lemonade
X5: Number of visitors not buying any beverage
Let X=X1+X2 be the number of visitors buying any hot beverage, Y=X3+X4 be the number of
visitors buying cold beverage, and Z=X+Y be the number of visitors buying any beverage.
a) What is the distribution of Z, the number of visitors buying any beverage?
b) What is the probability P(X1 = 4, X2 = 4, X3 = 5, X4 = 7, X5 = 5)? (You need not compute
the final value.)
c) What is the distribution of X1, the number of visitors buying Cappuccino?
d) What is the distribution of Y, the number of visitors buying a cold beverage?
e) What is the expected revenue of the shop from selling beverages that morning?
 Practice Problems: Discrete Distributions and Joint Distributions

1. A middle level executive of a multinational company in Mumbai receives several telephone

calls on his cell phone. According to him the calls arrive independently and are governed by a
Poisson distribution with an average of 8 calls per day. The calls originate either from known
acquaintances or from complete strangers in the ratio of 3:1 respectively. Answer the following
questions. (You may take e=2.718 for the calculations involving Poisson distribution).
a. What is the probability that the number of calls in a day is exactly 5?
b. What is the expected number of calls from strangers on any given day?
c. Given that there were 5 calls on a day, what is the chance that 4 of them were from
strangers?
d. What is the probability that on a given day, he receives 2 calls from strangers and 3 calls
from acquaintances?
e. What is the probability that on a given day all calls he receives are from strangers?
f. Suppose that on one particular day he decides to pick up at most the first 5 calls that he may
receive. If he receives less than or equal to 5 calls, he will pick up all of them. If he receives more
than 5 calls, he will only pick up the first 5 calls and does not pick up the rest. What is the
probability that on this day the number of calls he picks up from strangers is equal to the
number of calls he picks up from acquaintances?

2. Three students from a management school decided to appear for a job interview in a reputed
firm. The job interview had two levels, viz. I and II. A candidate moves to the second level (i.e.
level II) only if she passes the first level (i.e. level I). From past experience, it is known that for a
student in level I there is a 30% chance of passing and for a student entering level II there is a
10% chance of passing. For these three students who appear for the job interview, let X=
number of students who pass level I and Y = number of students who pass level II. Assume
students perform independently of each other in the interviews.

a. Find the probability distribution of X?

b. Find the joint distribution of X and Y.
c. Hence find the marginal distribution of Y.

3. If X ~Binomial (n=5, p=0.5) and Y~ Binomial (n=5, p=0.2) are independent random
variables, find P(X+Y>0).

4. A coin is tossed 3 times in a row independently. Let us assume that probability of heads = p
and probability of tails=1-p and that these probabilities do not change from one toss to another
toss. .
a. Write down the sample space for the experiment and the probabilities for each outcome.

We define the following random variables:

X= Number of heads minus number of tails.
Y= Minimum (number of heads, number of tails).
b. Write down the values taken by X and Y for each outcome in the sample space.
c. Write down the joint distribution of X and Y.
d. Write down the marginal distributions of X and Y.
e. If p=.5, what is Covariance (X,Y)?
f. If p=.5, are X and Y independent?.
 5. A 6-faced die is independently thrown 10 times. Each throw leads to one of the outcomes viz.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6, depending on the face that shows up. In each throw, the occurrence of face 2 is
twice as likely as face 1, occurrence of face 3 is thrice as likely as face 1, and in general
occurrence of face i is i-times as likely as face 1, for i=2,3,4,5,6. Define the following random
variables:
X1 = value of the face that shows up in the first throw.
(For example, if face 2 shows up in the first throw, then X 1=2. If face 6 shows up in the first
throw, then X1=6). Similarly, X2 = value of the face that shows up in the second throw. In
general, let Xj = value of the face that shows up in the j th throw, for j=1,2,…, 10. Let X= the sum
of the outcomes from the 10 independent throws of the die.
i.e., X= X1+ X2+ … +X10
a. Write down the p.m.f. for the random variable Xj.
b. What is E[Xj] and variance[Xj]
c. What is E[X] and Variance[X]?
d. What is P(X=10)?

6. Students from engineering and science colleges prepare over an extended period of several
years to appear for a competitive examination. A candidate can take up to five attempts to
qualify in the competitive exam. After each examination, the candidates are evaluated as either
qualified or failed. The outcomes from different attempts are independent for an individual and
also across individuals. Also, assume that the student sticks to the same mode of preparation
over different attempts. Relevant details on the different approaches students may take to
prepare are provided in the table below.

Probability of Percentage of students

Preparation Qualification in a taking this mode to
Mode given attempt prepare
1 Self Study 0.4 70%
2 Coaching Class 0.7 20%
Personalized
3 training 0.8 10%

a. What is the probability that a randomly chosen candidate qualifies in the 4 th attempt?
b. Given that a candidate qualified on the 4 th attempt, what is the probability that he
prepared by self-study?

7. A salesman has scheduled a two appointments to sell encyclopaedias. His first appointment
will lead to a sale with probability 0.3 and his second will independently lead to a sale with
probability 0.6. Any sale is made is equally likely to be for the deluxe model which costs Rs. 1000
or standard model which costs Rs. 500. Determine the probability distribution of X = total value
of sales.

8. Customers arrive at a travel agency at the rate of 11 per hour according to a Poisson
distribution. What is the probability that more than 2 customers arrive in a given hour?

9. The number of claims within a year from an insurance portfolio follows Poisson distribution
with mean = 100. Probability that any such claim is genuine is p = 0.1. What is the probability
that there are exactly 10 genuine claims in a year?
10. In a survey, probability that a person responds to a questionnaire is 0.4. Assume that
responding behaviour of each person is independent of others.
a. What is the probability that out of 20 questionnaires at least 12 will be returned?
b. How many questionnaires need to be mailed if we want to ensure that there is a 95%
probability that at least 100 will be returned?

11. X1 and X2 are iid (independent and identically distributed) with discrete uniform
distribution on S={1,2,….,N}, i.e. P(X1 = k)=P(X2=k)=1/N, for k in S
a. Find P(X1>= X2)
b. Find P(X1=X2)
 Self test problems joint and continuous distributions

1. Probability of an accident happening on a particular weekday (i.e. monday to

friday) is twice the probability of an accident on any day in the weekend. For
example, if probability of accident on monday is p then the probability of
accident on a friday is also p and probability of accident on sunday is p/2. 21
different accidents are reported in a week. What is the probability that equal
number of accidents happened during each day.

2. You arrive at a bus stop at 10 A.M, knowing that the bus will arrive at a time
that is uniformly distributed between 10 and 10:30 am.

a. What is the probability that you will wait more than 10 minutes?
b. If at 10:15 am the bus has still not arrived, what is the probability that
you will wait for 10 more minutes?

3. The annual rainfall (measured in inches) in a region is normally distributed

with mean 40 and variance 9. What is the probability that starting this year it
will take over 10 years before a year occurs having a rainfall over 50 inches?.
What assumptions are you making?

4. A man aiming at a target recieves 10 points if he is within 1 inch of the target,

5 points between 1 and 3 inch of target and no points otherwise. Find the
expected number of points scored if the shots distance from the target is
uniformly distributed between 0 and 10.

5. The annual net margins of a 100 year old company are known to be
approximately normally distributed. It has been observed that in 20 of the
100 years the net margins have fallen below 0 and in 10 of the 100 years the
margins have exceeded 5 crores. What can we say about the expected value
(µ) and the standard deviation (σ) of Net margins?

6. The number of years a radio functions is exponentially distributed with mean

= 8 years.

a. What is the probability that it will still be working after 8 years.

b. A person bought this radio who has been using it for the past 10 years,
in which time it has never failed. What is the probability that it will not
fail for 8 more years?

7. There are 2 questions in an exam each carrying 10 marks. The number of

questions a student attempts follows Bin(2,0.5). If a student attempts a
question, the marks he obtains follows N(5,1). Marks obtained on different
questions are independent of each other. What is the probability that the
student scores more than 15 marks?

8. The weekly salaries paid to employees of a small company that supplies part-
time laborers is on an average $500 with a standard deviation of $100. Assume
that the distribution of weekly salaries paid to employees of the company is
approximately normally distributed.

a. What percentage of employees makes more than $400 per week?

 b. Whats the 99th percentile of the weekly salary distribution?
c. If there is a 5% salary increase for the next year, what will be the
distribution of weekly salaries for next year?

9. An earth quake of scale more than 10 on the Richter scale is believed to hit a
region (on an average) once every 50 years. What is the probability that
there won’t be an earth quake of this scale in the next 75 years,
a. if the time till earthquake is uniformly distributed over the next 100
years.
b. if we believe that the occurence or non occurence of an earthquake
within a time frame has no bearing on future waiting time until next
occcurence.
10. If X ∼ exp(λ), then find the distribution of Y = cX.

11. A manufacturer makes shafts for electric motors. The external diameter is
normally dis- tributed with mean 1 inch and SD .001 inch. The manufacturer
purchases bushings which the shaft passes through. The internal diameter of
the hole in the bushing is normally dis- tributed with mean 1.002 inch and sd
.001. When the shaft is put in the bushing the clearance is defined as the
diameter of the hole in the bushing minus the diameter of the shaft. Negative
clearance means the shaft does not fit.

a. For a shaft and bushing selected at random, what is the probability

that the shaft does not fit?
b. To operate properly the clearance should be between .0016 and .0048
inch. What fraction of the assembled units will be in this range?
c. Suppose the expected diameter of the shaft can be altered by a suitable
machine adjust- ment. What should be the expected diameter of the
shaft so that the probability of clearance being in the desired range is
maximized?
Question 1

A committee consisting of 4 people is in charge of passing a bill. To pass the bill, at least three
members should vote in it’s favour. The members vote independently. The probability that a
member votes in favour of the bill is 60%.
Find the probability that the bill is passed.

a) 0.4752 b) 0.1792 c) 0.0272 d) 0.0837

Question 2.

In a population, 40% speak both Hindi and English; 10% speak neither Hindi nor English. There
are twice as many people who speak “only Hindi” as there are people who speak “only English”.

(i) What is probability that a randomly selected person speaks English?

a) 0.5667 b) 0.4333 c) 0.4 d) 0.45
(ii) What is the probability that a randomly selected person speaks English given that he
speaks Hindi?
a) 0.3 b) 0.2857 c ) 0.5454 d ) 0.333

Question 3
The government of a country has decided to provide a unique identification number (UIN) to its
citizens. The UIN comprises Five alphabets and Three digits. The alphabets will occupy first Five
positions of the UIN and the digits will occupy the remaining positions. The alphabets are chosen
from {A, E, X, Y, Z}. The digits are drawn from {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}. The alphabets and the digits
in the UIN can be repeated. Find the number of citizens who can be given a UIN under this
scheme.

a) 62,50,000 b) 2,50,00,000 c) 1,25,00,000 d) 31,25,000