ZIMBABWE OPEN UNIVERSITY BSTD101

BSc Honours in Mathematics and Statistics: Intake 2(Z), Part 1 Semester 1, 2022

PROBABILITY THEORY 1: Assignment 1

Due: 21 March 2022

Time : 6 hours

Answer ALL questions and show all necessary working

A1. Prove or disprove the following statements:

a+b−1
(a) If P (A) = a and P (B) = b, then P (A \ B) ≥ b
. [4]
(b) If P (A \ B) ≥ P (A), then P (B \ A) ≥ P (B) [4]

A2. A biased coin has probability α of landing heads. A, B and C toss the coin successively,
A tossing first, until a heads occurs. The person who tosses the first head wins. Find
the probability of winning for each. [6]

A3. The experiment is to toss two balls into four boxes in such a way that each ball is likely
to fall in any box. Let Y denote the number of balls in the first box.

(a) What is the cumulative distribution function of Y ? [3]

(b) What is the density function of Y ? [2]
(c) Find the mean and variance of Y . [4]

A4. (a) Let X be a random variable with mean µ and variance σ 2 . Show that E[(X − b)2 ],
as a function of b, is minimized when b = µ. [5]
(b) (i) State and prove the Chebyshev inequality. [7]
2
(ii) If X is a random variable such that E(X) = 3 and E(X ) = 13, use the
Chebyshev inequality to determine a lower bound for P (−2 < X < 8). [6]

A5. Let f (x) = ke−α x (1 − e−α x ) I(0,∞) (x).

(a) Find k such that f (x) is a density function. [4]

(b) Find the corresponding cumulative distribution function. [3]

1
 (c) Find P (X > 1). [3]

A6. (a) The probability that a door-to-door salesman convinces a customer to buy is 0.75.
Assuming sales are independent, find the probability that the salesman makes a
sale before reaching the third house. [4]
(b) The number of misprints per page in a book follows a poison distribution with
mean λ. If the probability that a page has no misprints is 0.135, find
(i) the value of λ. [3]
(ii) the probability that there are less than 4 misprints on a particular page. [4]

A7. Bottles of beer a delivered to shops in crates containing 12 bottles each. The weights
of bottles are normally distributed with mean 2.4 kg and standard deviation 0.04 kg.

The weights of empty crates are normally distributed with mean 2.7 kg and standard
deviation 0.3 kg.

Assuming that all random variables are independent, find the probability that
(a) a full crate will weigh between 31 kg and 32 kg. [5]
Two bottles are selected at random from a crate.
(b) Find the probability that they differ in weight by more than 0.10 kg. [5]

A8. The probability that a Holiday Inn hotel guest ask for steak at an evening meal is 35 .
One evening, 10 guests have dinner and order independent. Calculate the probability
that
(a) (i) no guest will ask for steak. [3]
(ii) exactly three guests will ask for steak. [3]
(b) Given that the Holiday Inn hotel has only four steaks, calculate, the probability
that there will be insignificant steaks. [4]

A9. Ace and Bet Company flies two types of planes, a two-engine or a four-engine plane. Of
the two types of planes which one has a higher chance of a successful flight if aeroplane
engines operate independently and each can fail with probability 0.4? [6]

A10. The joint probability distribution of U and V is given by g(u, v) = α (u + v 2 ) for

u = −1, 0, 1, 2 and v = −1, 2, 3.
(a) Represent g(u, v) in a table of U against V and find the value of α. [5]
(b) Calculate Cov(U, V ). [7]

END OF ASSIGNMENT [100]