Exercise: Probability Distribution

1) A survey found that one out of five Americans says he or she has visited a doctor in any given
month. If 15 people are selected at random, find the probability that exactly 4 will have visited a
doctor last month
2) A survey from Teenage Research Unlimited (Northbrook, Illinois) found that 30% of teenage
consumers receive their spending money from part time jobs. If 8 teenagers are selected at
random, find the probability that at least 5 of them will have a part time job.
3) It is reported that 5% of electronic appliances produced by an electronic factory are defective. A
quality engineer randomly selects a sample of 20 electronic appliances from the production line.
a) Find the probability that exactly 2 appliances are defective
b) Find the probability that less than 6 are defective
c) What is the expected number of defective appliances from the sample selected
4) A recent study found that 80% of all people over 60 years of age wear glasses. If a random
sample of 7 people over 60 years of age is selected, find these probabilities
a) Exactly 4 people will not wear glasses
b) At most 2 people wear glasses
5) If there are 200 typographical errors randomly distributed in a 500-page manuscript, find the
probability that a given page contains exactly 5 errors.
6) The number of industrial injuries per working week in a particular factory is known to follow a
Poisson distribution with mean 0.5. Find the probability that
a) Less than 2 accidents
b) More than 1 accidents
c) In a three week period there will be no accidents
7) Cars arrive at a motorway toll booth at an average rate of 150 cars per hour. Find the probability
that
a) No car arrive in a given minute
b) At least two cars arrive in 2 minutes
c) At most four cars arrive in 10 minutes
8) The average number of phone inquiries per day at the Poisson control centre is 4. Find the
probability that it will receive
a) Six calls on given day
b) Less than 2 on two days
9) In a food packaging plant, the number of machine breakdowns in a given week follows a poisson
distribution with variance 2. Find the probability of
a) At most one machine breakdown in a given week
b) More than four machine breakdown in a month
10) A large lot of items is known to contain 4% defective items. If a sample of 100 is randomly drawn
from the lot, use the Poisson approximation to find the probability it will contain
a) no defective
b) more than 5 defectives.