Indian Institute Of Technology Patna

Department of Mathematics
MA1201 - Probability Theory and Ordinary Differential
Equations
Tutorial Sheet

1. Find the probability distribution of the number of white balls drawn when 3 balls
are drawn without replacement from a bag containing 4 white and 6 red balls.

2. A random variable X has the following distribution:

X 1 2 3 4
P (X = xi ) k 2k 3k 4k

Find the value of k, the mean and variance of the distribution. What is P (X < 3)
and P (X ≥ 3)?

3. A random variable X has the following distribution:

X 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
2 2 2
P (X = xi ) 0 k 2k 2k 3k k 2k 7k + k

Find the value of k.

4. Verify that the function f (x) = 34 ( 14 )x , x = 0, 1, 2, ... is a probability mass function.

5. Let 

 0 x<0

k 0≤x<1
F (x) =


 2k 1≤x<2
x≥2

1
Find k such that F (x) is the CDF of a discrete random variable X. Also find
P (1 ≤ X ≤ 2) and P (X > 2).

6. The range of a random variable X is {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, x}, where x is unknown. If each

7. Let X be a random variable that takes only −1, 0, 1 as its values. If the expected
value of X is 0 and the variance is 12 , find the probability distribution of X.

8. Product codes of two, three, four, five or six letters are equally likely. What are
the mean and standard deviation of the number of letters in the codes.

1
 9. If the chance that a telephone line being busy at any instant is 0.01, what is the
probability that all the 5 lines are busy? What is the probability that more than
3 lines are busy?

10. If 20% of the bolts produced by a machine are defective, determine the probability
that out of 4 bolts chosen at random one will be defective.

11. The probability of a man hitting a target is 0.5. How many times must he fire so
that the probability of hitting the target at least once is more than 90%?

12. If the probability is 0.75 that an applicant for a driver’s license will pass the road
test at any given try, what is the probability that an applicant will finally pass
the test on the fifth try?

13. Assume that each of your calls to a popular radio station has a probability of
0.03 of connecting (of not obtaining a busy signal). Assume that your calls are
independent. What is the probability that your first call that connects is your
tenth call? Also, what is the probability that it requires more than five calls for
you to connect? Calculate the mean number of calls needed to connect.

14. Using Poisson distribution, find the probability that the ace of spades will be
drawn from a pack of well-shuffled cards at least once in 104 consecutive trials.

15. Average number of accidents on any day on a national highway is 1.8. Determine
the probability that the number of accidents is at least one and the probability
that it is at most one.

16. Find k such that f (x) is a probability density( function of a continuous random
kxe−x , 0 < x < 1
variable X, where f (x) is defined as f (x) = . Also find the
0, otherwise
mean and variance.
(
1 − (1 + x)e−x , x ≥ 0
17. The cdf of a random variable F (x) = . Find the corre-
0, x<0
sponding density function of random variable X and P (0.5 ≤ X ≤ 1).

18. For the following density function f (x) = ae−|x| , −∞ < x < ∞ of a random
variable X. Find a and mean and variance.
(
3x2 , 0 < x ≤ 1
19. A continuous random variable X has a pdf f (x) = . Find a
0, otherwise
and b such that P (X ≤ a) = P (X > a) and P (X > b) = 0.05.

20. The probability density function of the time you arrive at a terminal (in minutes
after 8AM) is f (x) = 0.1e0.1x for x < 0. Determine the probability that

(a) you arrive by 8:30AM

2
 (b) you arrive between 8:15AM and 8:30AM
(c) you arrive before 8:40AM on two or more days of 5 days. Assume that your
arrival times on different days are independent.

Determine the cumulative distribution function and use it to determine the prob-
ability that you arrive between 8:20AM and 8:40AM.

21. Suppose X is uniformly distributed over [−2, 3]. Determine the mean and stan-
dard deviation of X. Find the value of a such that P (|X| ≤ a) = 0.9. Also find
the cumulative distribution function.

22. Let X denote the number of successes in a test. If X is normally distributed with
mean 100 and standard deviation 15, find the probability that x does not exceed
130.

23. Assume the mean height of soldiers to be 68.22 inches with a variance of 10.8
inches. How many soldiers in a regiment of 1000 would you expect to be over 6
feet tall?

24. In a normal distribution, 31% of items are under 45 and 8% of the items are over
64. Find the mean and standard deviation of the distribution.

25. The mean of a normal distribution is 60 and 6% of the values are greater than
70. Find the standard deviation of the distribution.

26. The life of automobile voltage regulators has an exponential distribution with a
mean life of 5 years. You purchase a 5-year-old automobile with a working voltage
regulator and plan to own it for 5 years.

(a) What is the probability that the voltage regulator fails during your owner-
ship?
(b) If your regulator fails after you own the automobile three years and it is
replaced, what is the mean time until the next failure?

27. Suppose that the time to failure (in hours) of fans in a personal computer can be
modelled by an exponential distribution with λ = 0.0004.

(a) What proportion of the fans will last at least 10000 hours?
(b) What proportion of the fans will last at most 7000 hours?

28. Calls to the helpline of a large computer distributor follow a Poisson distribution
with a mean of 20 calls per minute.

(a) What is the mean time until the 100th call?

3
29. The length of time (in seconds) that a user views a page on a website before
moving to another page is a lognormal random variable with parameters θ = 0.5
and ω 2 = 2.

(a) What is the probability that a page viewed for more than 10 seconds?
(b) By what length of time have 50% of the users moved to another page?
(c) What are the mean and standard deviation of the time until a user moves
from the page?

30. The maximum time to complete a task in a project is 2.5 days. Suppose that the
completion time as a proportion of this maximum is a beta random variable with
α = 2 and β = 3. What is the probability that the task requires more than 2
days to complete?

31. From past experience, a professor knows that the test score of a student taking
her final examination is a random variable with mean 75.

(a) Give an upper bound for the probability that a student’s test score will
exceed 85.
(b) Suppose, in addition, the professor knows that the variance of a student’s
test score is equal to 25. What can be said about the probability that a
student will score between 65 and 85?

***