Question

please help! will give medal!
Shelly delivers the weekly local paper to neighborhoods in her town. House numbers are even on one side of the street and odd on the other. Shelly delivers an equal number of papers to both sides of the street. Although she always aims for the front doorstep, Shelly typically misses on three of the tosses on her route each week. Design and conduct a simulation to estimate the probability that next week, Shelly's three misses will all be at odd-numbered houses

Answer 1

Hint: You can set up the experiment using 3 coins to collect the data. Allow one side of the coin to represent Heads (evens) and one other side to represent Tails (odds).

a) Explain clearly your design of the simulation, including choice of probability tool and description of a single trial.
b) Conduct the simulation with twenty trials and record the results.
c) Calculate the experimental probability that all 3 of Shelly's missed papers will be at odd-numbered houses.

Answer 2

can someone please help?

Answer 3

does it say how many houses there are total? or how many are per side?

Answer 4

oh wait, that may not matter. Let me think about this a bit more

Answer 5

no, that's all of the information I have, and thankyou I really appreciate it

Answer 6

ok she misses 3 times. I see where they're getting the 3 coins from

Answer 7

say you have 3 coins. Each coin represents a miss. Let

heads = she misses an even numbered house
tails = she misses an odd numbered house

Answer 8

the exercise they want you to do is figure out what the probability is she misses 3 odd houses

so that's the same as getting 3 tails with this simulation

Answer 9

making sense so far?

Answer 10

so then would it be 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2, = 1/8??

Answer 11

correct, that's the probability of getting 3 tails

Answer 12

so the probability she misses 3 odd numbered houses is 1/8 or 0.125 which is 12.5%

Answer 13

that is the theoretical probability

Answer 14

which is different from the experimental probability

Answer 15

so which is which? :/

Answer 16

well they aren't asking about the theoretical probability at all

Answer 17

so 1/8 isn't one of the answers they want

Answer 18

do you know what they mean when they put "b) Conduct the simulation with twenty trials and record the results. " ?

Answer 19

do they want me to conduct an actual experiment?

Answer 20

yes

Answer 21

you'll basically flip 3 coins (one at a time or maybe have 3 people do it at once?)

that represents 1 trial

Answer 22

each trial tells you what misses happen

so for instance, say you flip 3 coins and you get HTH

H = heads
T = tails

that means you missed on the even side first, then missed on the odd side, then missed on the even side

Answer 23

you would do this 20 times. Recording the results each time

so you'll have something like this

trial 1: HTH
trial 2: HHT
trial 3: THT

something like that, all the way to trial 20

Answer 24

when you have everything recorded, you will count the number trials where T shows up 3 times (TTT). Then you divide that number by 20 to get your experimental probability

Answer 25

thankyou so much if I have any other questions would u mind if i sent u a message tomorrow?

Answer 26

Side Note: if everything is truly random, then your experimental probability should be close to the theoretical probability. This is especially true if you have A LOT of trials.

Answer 27

sure that works