A student needs to take an exam, but hasn’t done any revision for it.

He needs to guess the

answer to each question, and the probability of getting a question right is 0.05. There are 50
questions on the exam paper. What’s the probability he’ll get 5 questions right? Use the Poisson
approximation to the binomial distribution to find out.

Q: Why would I ever want to use the Q: So when can I use this Q: Why do we use np as the
Poisson distribution to approximate the approximation? parameter for the Poisson distribution?
binomial distribution?

A: When n is very large, it can be difficult

to calculate nCr. Some calculators run out
of memory, and the results can be so large
they’re just unwieldy. Using the Poisson
distribution in this way is a way round this
sort of problem.
A: You can use it when n is large (say
over 50) and p is small (say less than
0.1). When this is the case, the binomial
distribution and the Poisson distribution are
approximately the same.
A: The Poisson distribution takes one
parameter, λ, and E(X) = λ. This means that
if we have use the Poisson approximation
of the binomial distribution, we can
substitute in the expectation of the binomial
distribution, np.