MG 602 Probability theories Exercise

1. Leakage from underground gasoline tanks at service stations can damage the environment. It is estimated
that 25% of the tanks leak. You examine 15 tanks chosen at random, independently of each other
a) What is the mean number of leaking tanks in such samples of 15?
b) What is the probability that 2 or more of the 15 tanks leak?

2. A machine that produces stamping for automobile engines is malfunctioning and producing 10%
defectives. The defective and non-defective stamping proceeds from the machine in a random manner. If
the next five stamping are tested find the probability that three of them are defective?

3. An oil company purchased an option on land in a city. Preliminary geologic studies assigned the following
prior probabilities.
p(high-quality oil) 0.5, p(medium-quality oil) 0.2, p(no oil) 0.3
a) What is the probability of finding oil?

After 200 feet of drilling on the first well, a soil test is made. The probabilities of finding the particular
type of soil identified by the test are:
p(soil|high-quality oil) 0.2, p(soil|medium-quality oil) 0.2, p(soil|no oil) 0.3
b) What are the revised probabilities, and what is the new probability of finding oil?

4. The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) limits the amount of vinyl chloride in the plant air emissions
to no more than 10 parts per millions. Suppose a mean emission of vinyl chloride for a particular plant is 4
parts per million. Assume the number of parts per million of vinyl chloride in air sample x, follows a
Poisson probability distribution:
a) What is the standard deviation of the plant?
b) Is it likely that a sample of air from the plant would yield a value of x that would exceed the
EPA limit? Explain. Note that P(x≤9) = 0.991868

5. Airlines generally sell more tickets for a flight than there are seats on the aircraft, because some passengers
don’t turn up on time, usually for random reasons. If the airline only sold one ticket per seat, their planes
would likely have empty seats which are lost profit on each flight. If too many passengers turn up for a
flight, the airline hopes that someone will accept a reasonable sum of money to take the next flight.
Overbooking is sensible, efficient behavior and good for passengers if sensibly administered by the airline.
 This is because ticket prices should be at their lowest when each plane is just full, and there is quite likely
some passenger who will take money to fly at some other time.
An airline has a regular flight with 120 seats. It always sells 125 tickets. Suppose that past experience shows
that about 10% of passengers who are schedule to take a particular flight fail to show up
On average, how many passengers will be on each flight?
a) How often will they have enough seats for all of the passengers who show up for the flight
b) How often will they need to deal with overbooked passengers
c) What is the probability that the flight is under booked?

6. Suppose that over the long run a manufacturing process produces 1% defective items.
a) What is the chance of getting two or more defective items in a sample of 200 items produced by the
process?
b) Find Poisson approximations to the probability of the event in 5 (a)

7. Customers are used to evaluate preliminary product designs. In the past, 95% of highly successful products
received good reviews, 60% of moderately successful product received good reviews, and 10% of poor
products received good reviews. In addition, 40% of products have been highly successful, 35% have been
moderately successful, and 25% have been poor products.
a) What is the probability that a product attains a good review?
b) If a new design attains a good review, what is the probability that it will be a highly successful
product?
c) If a product does not attain a good review, what is the probability that it will be a highly successful
product?

8. You are a financial analyst facing the task of selecting bond mutual funds to purchase for client’s portfolio.
You have narrowed the funds to be selected to ten different funds. In order to diversify your client’s
portfolio, you will recommend the purchase of four different funds. Six of the funds are short-term
corporate bond funds. What is the probability that of the four funds selected, three are short-term corporate
bond funds?

9. An electronic office product contains 5000 electronic components. Assume that the probability that each
component operates without failure during the useful life of the product is 0.999, and assume that the
 components fail independently. Approximate the probability that 10 or more of the original 5000
components fail during the useful life of the product.

10. A dryer manufacturer purchases heating elements from three different suppliers: Supplier A, Supplier B,
and Supplier C. Thirty percent of the heating elements are supplied by Supplier A, 50 % Supplier B, and
20% by Supplier C. The elements are mixed in a supply bin prior to inspection and installation. Based on
past experience, 10% of the Supplier A elements are defective, compared to only 5% of those supplied by
Supplier B 10% of the and just 4% of those from Supplier C. An assembly worker randomly selects an
element for installation.
a) What is the probability that the element is defective and was supplied by Supplier A?
b) What is the probability that the element is good and was supplied by Supplier C?

11. A manufacturing plant’s main production line breaks down an average of 2.4 times per day. Whenever the
line goes down, it costs the company $500 in maintenance, repairs, and lost production. What is the
probability that the production line will break down at least 3 times tomorrow? What is the approximate
expected value for the amount of money that production line breakdowns will cost the company each day?

The company in has disciplined a worker who was suspected of pilfering tools and supplies from the plant.
The very next day, the production line broke down 9 times. Management has confronted the union with
accusations of sabotage on the line, but the union president says it’s just a coincidence that the production
line happened to break down so many times the day after the worker was disciplined. Using probabilities
appropriate to your discussion, comment on how much of a coincidence this high number of breakdowns
would appear to be.

12. Airline fatalities U.S. airlines average about 1.6 fatalities per month. Assume that the probability
distribution for x, the number of fatalities per month, can be approximated by a Poisson probability
distribution.
a) What is the probability that no fatalities will occur during any given month?
b) What is the probability that one fatality will occur during any given month?
c) Find E(x) and the standard deviation of x

13. National environmental Council environment protection act mandates the tracking and disposal of
hazardous waste produced at Tanzania facilities. A recent study reported the hazardous-waste generation
and disposal characteristics of 209 facilities. Only 8 of these facilities treated hazardous waste on-site.
 a) In a random sample of 10 of the 209 facilities, what is the expected number in the sample
that treat hazardous waste on-site? Interpret this result.
b) Find the probability that 4 of the 10 selected facilities treat hazardous waste on-site.
c) Compute binomial and Poisson probability approximations
d) Compute and interpret the binomial and Poisson probability approximations.

14. A manufacturer of automobile tires reports that among a shipment of 5000 sent to a local distributor, 1000
are slightly blemished. If one purchases 10 of these tires at random from the distributor, what is the
probability that exactly 3 are blemished?

15. Three different airlines (1, 2, and 3) operate night flights from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza. Experience shows
that 40% of airline 1’s flights are late in take-off, 50% of airline 2’s flights are late in take-off, and that
70% of airline 3’s flights are late in taking off. On a particular night, I select in a completely random fashion
one of the three airlines and fly on its night flight
a) What is the probability that I select airline 1 and I am late taking off?
b) What is the probability that I am late taking off?
c) Given that I was late in takeoff, what is the probability that I selected airline 1

16. Nyanza Ginnery Company ltd produces spare parts for its machines. The number of breakdown per hour is
2. One machine maintenance technician is attached permanently to the machine shop but calls for assistance
when there are more than two breakdowns in a given hour. Determine the probability of having:
a) More than 2 breakdowns
b) At most 3 breakdowns
c) During a 120 hr week, how many times on average would the technician call for assistance?

17. During the early stage of product development, some companies use focus groups to get the reaction of
customers to a new product or design. The particular focus group in this example has nine randomly
selected customers. After being shown a prototype, they were asked to, “Would you buy this product if it
was sold for Tsh 100,000”. The questionnaire allowed only two answers yes or no. When the answers were
totaled six of the nine customers in the group answered yes. Prior to the focus group the development team
claimed that 80% of customer would want to buy the product at this price. If the developers are right, what
should we expect to happen at the focus group?
a) Is it likely for six out of nine customers in the group to say they would buy it?
 b) What is the likelihood of the group to be unanimous?
c) What assumptions are required for the answer in part b to be valid

18. A consulting firm submitted a bid for a large research project. The firm’s management initially felt they
had a 50-50 chance of getting the project. However, the agency to which the bid was submitted
subsequently requested additional information on the bid. Past experience indicates that for 75% of the
successful bid and 40% of the unsuccessfully bid the agency requested additional information.
a) What is the prior probability of the bid being successfully (that is prior to the request for additional
information?)
b) What is the conditional probability of a request for additional information given that the bid will
ultimately be successful?
c) Compute the posterior probability that the bid will be successful given a request for additional
information
d) Compute the posterior probability that the bid will be successful given that no additional
information is requested
e) What is the conditional probability of a request for additional information given that the bid will
ultimately be successful?

19. A factory production line is manufacturing bolts using three machines, A, B and C. Of the total output,
machine A is responsible for 25%, machine B for 35% and machine C for the rest. It is known from previous
experience with the machines that 5% of the output from machine A is defective, 4% from machine B and
2% from machine C. A bolt is chosen at random from the production line and found to be defective. What
is the probability that it came from: machine A (b) machine B (c) machine C?

20. A company buys tires from two suppliers, 1 and 2. Supplier 1 has a record of delivering tires containing
10% defectives, whereas supplier 2 has a defective rate of only 5%. Suppose 40% of the current supply
came from supplier 1. If a tire is selected randomly from this supply and observed to be defective, find the
probability that it came from supplier 1

21. In an assembly-line production of industrial robots, gearbox assemblies can be installed in 1 minute each
if holes have been properly drilled in the boxes and in10 minutes each if the holes must be re-drilled.
Twenty gearboxes are in stock, and it is assumed that two will have improperly drilled holes. Five
gearboxes are to be randomly selected from the 20 available for installation in the next five robots in line.
a) Find the probability that all five boxes will fit properly.
 b) Find the expected value, variance, and standard deviation of the time it takes to install these five
gearboxes

22. It is recommended to use a Poisson process to model the number of failures in commercial water pipes, the
estimates of the failure rate are given, in units of failures per 100 km of pipe per day, Given the data, answer
the following:
a. For PVC pipe in 2020, the estimated failure rate is 0.0081 failures per 100 kilometers of pipe per day.
Consider a 100- kilometers -long segment of such pipe. What is the expected number of failures in 1 year
(365 days)? Based on this expectation, what is the probability of at least one failure along such a pipe in 1
year?
b. For cast iron pipe in 2020, the estimated mean failure is 0.0864 failures per 100 kilometers per day. Suppose
a town had 1500 kilometers of cast iron pipe underground in 2020. What is the probability of at least one
failure somewhere along this pipe system on any given day?