DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL ENGINEERING

MILITARY INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

ASSIGNMENT -1

STUDENT ID: 201911019

Name : Maliha Mannan
Course Code : CE-207
1) Ms. Perez figures that there is a 30 percent chance that her company will set up a
branch office in Phoenix. If it does, she is 60 percent certain that she will be made
manager of this new operation. What is the probability that Perez will be a Phoenix
branch office manager?
Solution: Let, A be the event that the company sets up a branch office in Phoenix and
B be the event that Perez is made the Phoenix manager.
So, we get,
P(A)= 0.3
P(B|A)= 0.6
The desired probability, P(A|B)= P(B)*P(B|A)
= 0.3 *0.6
= 0.18
Hence, there is an 18 percent chance that Perez will be the Phoenix manager (Ans.)

2) An insurance company believes that people can be divided into two classes- those
that are accident prone and those that are not. Their statistics show that an accident-
prone person will have an accident at some time within a fixed 1-year period with
probability .4, whereas this probability decreases to .2 for a non-accident-prone person.
If we assume that 30 percent of the population is accident prone, what is the
probability that a new policy holder will have an accident within a year of purchasing a
policy?
Solution: Let, A be the event that the policy holder is accident prone and B be the
event that the policy holder will have an accident within a year of purchase.
So, we get,
P(A) = 0.3
P(AC) = 1-0.3= 0.7
P(B|A) = 0.4
P(B|AC) = 0.2
The desired probability, P(B) = P(A)*P(B|A)+P(AC)*P(B|AC)
= 0.3*0.4+0.2*0.7
= 0.26
Hence, there is a 26 percent that the new policy holder will have an accident within a
year of purchasing a policy (Ans.)

3) In answering a question on a multiple-choice test, a student either knows the answer

or she guesses. Let p be the probability that she knows the answer and 1 – p the
probability that she guesses. Assume that a student who guesses at the answer will be
correct with probability 1/m, where m is the number of multiple-choice alternatives.
What is the conditional probability that a student knew the answer to a question given
that she answered it correctly?
Solution: Let, C denote the event that the student answers the question correctly and K
denotes the event she actually knows the answer.
So we get,
P(K) = p
P(KC) =1-p
P(K∩C) = P(K)*P(C|K)
= p*1
=p
The probability that the student answers correctly, P(C) =P(K)*P(C|K) + P(K C)*P(C|
KC)
= p + (1/m) (1-p)
The desired probability, P(K|C) =

= (Ans.)