Fall 2015

STAT2001 Midterm Examination

Instructions: It is a 1.5-hour Exam. Do all six questions. Show your steps clearly.
Give the best answer to each question.

Question 1:

Suppose that in a hospital, number of babies born follows a Poisson process with a rate of 7
births per day.

(a) (5 marks) What is the probability that at most 2 babies are born during the next 3 hours?
(b) (5 marks) What is the expected number of births for a period of 2 days?

Question 2:

(a) (6 marks) Urn A contains 3 red and 3 black balls, whereas urn B contains 4 red and 6
black balls. If a ball is randomly selected from each urn, what is the probability that the
balls will have the same color?
(b) (6 marks) A group of 6 people is to be chosen from 7 men and 8 women. If the chosen
group must consist of at least 3 women and at least 2 men, how many different groups are
possible?
(c) (6 marks) Six balls are randomly chosen from an urn containing 8 red, 10 green and 12
blue balls. Given the information that no red balls are chosen, what is the conditional
probability that there are exactly 2 green balls among the 6 chosen balls?

Question 3:

There is a game that each time when you play the game, you have a probability p of winning and
a probability 1-p of losing. You will first play the game for 5 times. If you lose on the fifth time,
you will stop. However if you win on the fifth time, you will keep on playing the game until you
lose.

(a) (6 marks) Find the expected number of times that you play.
(b) (6 marks) Find the expected number of times that you lose.

~~P.T.O.~~

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Question 4:

(a) (8 marks) The number of storms in a good year is a Poisson random variable with mean 3,
whereas the number of storms in a bad year is a Poisson random variable with mean 5. If
the probability for the next year to be a good year is 0.4 and the probability for the next
year to be a bad year is 0.6, find the expected value of the number of storms that will
occur in next year.
(b) If E(X)=1 and Var(X)=5, find
I. (3 marks) E[(2+X)2]
II. (3 marks) Var(4+3X)

Question 5:

A continuous random variable X has the following probability density function:

c(1  x)2 , for  2  x  0

f ( x)  
 0 , otherwise

(a) (6 marks) Find the constant c.

(b) (6 marks) Find P(-1<X≤1).
(c) (6 marks) Find the 85th percentile of the distribution of X.
(d) (6 marks) Find the mean of X.

Question 6:

Consider a continuous random variable X having the following probability density function:

1 x 
 exp   c  , for    x  3
f ( x)   3 3 
 0 , otherwise

(a) (6 marks) Find the constant c.

(b) (10 marks) Find the moment generating function of X.
(c) (6 marks) Find the mean of X.

~END~