Probability

How likely something is to happen.

Many events can’t be predicted with total certainty. The best we can say is how likely they
are to happen, using the idea of probability.
What is a probability?
 A probability indicates the chance that an event will happen.
 A probability can be any number from 0 to 1.
 A probability of 0 or 0% means that an event will never happen.
 A probability of ½ or 50% means that an event is equally likely to happen or not
happen.
 A probability of 1 or 💯 means that an event will certainly happen.
 The probability that event A will happen is written as P(A).
 The probability that event A will not happen, P(not A) is equal to 1 – P(A).
Example : If the probability that it will rain tomorrow is 20%, then the probability that
it will not rain tomorrow is 100%-20% = 80%
How is the probability of an event calculated?
An event could be the outcome of any random process such as the toss of a fair coin, the
roll of a fair number cube, or the random selection of an item from a group.
We use the notation
number of ways ( A ) can happen
Probability of an event happening (A) =
Total numbers of outcoes
 The ways A can happen is the number of items of type A .
 The number of possible outcomes is the total number in the group.
 The total numbers in a group is written as Ω
 If the group is empty then it’s written as Ω={∅}
Let’s start with some simple examples
Tossing a Coin
When a coin is tossed, there are two possible outcomes:
Heads (H) or
Tails (T)
Also:
 The probability of the coin landing H is ½
 The probability of the coin landing T is ½
Throwing Dice
When a single die is thrown, there are six possible outcomes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
The probability of any one of them is ⅙
THIS IS THE HOMEWORK
A Box contains 5 red, 10 green, and 20 orange candies. If one candy is selected randomly
from the box.
 What is the probability that the selected candy will be red?
 What is the probability that the selected candy will be orange?
 What is the probability that the selected candy will be green?
The answer :