Solved – A simple classical statistics problem that I have trouble with

probabilityself-study

This question was from my CAs. Nothing has been changed.

A local weatherman forecasts that there is a 65% chance of rain on the
coming Saturday and a 65% chance of rain on the Sunday immediately following that Saturday.
What can you conclude from the above weather forecast?
Choose one of the following options.

A. It will certainly rain during the weekend (that is, it will rain on at least
one of the two weekend days).

B. The chance of rain on Saturday and Sunday is 42.25%.

C. The weather forecast does not sound right, as P(rain on Saturday)+
P(rain on Sunday) > 100%.

D. The chance of rain on Saturday and Sunday is greater than 50%, but
less than 85%.

E. The chance of rain on Saturday and Sunday is between 30% and 65%.

F. None of the above.

Chance of raining on Saturday = 0.65 Sunday = 0.65
Therefore, chance of raining on Saturday and Sunday is 0.65*0.65 = 0.4225

Doesn't this means there are two answers, B and E? Which is more correct?

Best Answer

Considered only as a test problem, not as a real-world problem, the answer is fairly straightforward. We are told $P(A)=P(B)=0.65$, where $A$ is rain on Saturday and $B$ is rain on Sunday. Ruling out options A and C, the others are about $P(A \cap B)$.

We know that $P(A\cap B) = P(A) + P(B) - P(A\cup B)$. Since this is a multiple choice problem, we'll use intuition instead of algrebra to think about what $P(A \cup B)$ could be; we'll then use this to calculate what $P(A\cap B)$ could be.

Thinking of a simple Venn diagram, this is the combined area within either of two circles. One extreme is that the circles overlap; then the combined area is $0.65$. The other extreme is that they don't overlap at all; the combined would then be $0.65+0.65=1.3$. This is impossible, as the probability must be less than $1$, so we know that they must overlap, and that $1$ is the largest possibility.

Therefore $0.65 \leq P(A\cup B) \leq 1$. Substituting into our earlier equation, we get $0.65 + 0.65 - 0.65 = 0.65$ and $0.65 + 0.65 - 1 = 0.3$.

So $0.3 \leq P(A\cap B) \leq 0.65$: choice E.

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