Suppose that 30% of all students who have to buy a text for a particular course want a new copy (the successes!), whereas the other 70% want a used copy. Consider randomly selecting 15 purchasers. (a) What are the mean value and standard deviation of the number who want a new copy of the book? (Round your standard deviation to two decimal places.) (b)What is the probability that the number who want new copies is more than two standard deviations away from the mean value? (Round your answer to three decimal places.) (c) The bookstore has 10 new copies and 10 used copies in stock. If 15 people come in one by one to purchase this text, what is the probability that all 15 will get the type of book they want from current stock? [Hint: Let X = the number who want a new copy. For what values of X will all 15 get what they want?] (Round your answer to three decimal places.) (d) Suppose that new copies cost $150 and used copies cost $70. Assume the bookstore currently has 50 new copies and 50 used copies. What is the expected value of total revenue from the sale of the next 15 copies purchased? [Hint: Let h(X) = the revenue when X of the 15 purchasers want new copies. Express this as a linear function.]
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
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