Question

At one of New York’s traffic signals, if more than 17 cars are held up at the intersection, a traffic officer will intervene and direct the traffic. The hourly traffic pattern from 12:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. mimics the random numbers generated between 5 and 25. (This holds true if there are no external factors such as accidents or car breakdowns.)

Answer 1

The random variable is the number of cars held up at the intersection.

A random variable is one whose value is aleatory, then you can not know anticipatedly the outcome for sure. In this case, the number of cars held up at the intersection may be different at any time inside the range given and you cannot know the number of cars that there will be in a future moment.