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A bag of 13 marbles contains 7 marbles with red on them, 4 with blue on them, 5 with green on them, and 3 with red and green on them. What is the probability that a randomly chosen marble has either green or red on it? Note that these events are not mutually exclusive. Express your answer as a fraction in lowest terms or a decimal rounded to the nearest millionth.

User Christoph Wurm
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1 Answer

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13 votes

Let's call event R the event of choosing a red marble, and event G the event of choosing a green ball.

Since we want the probability of drawing a marble either green or red, we can calculate the probability of R or G using the formula below:


P(R\cup G)=P(R)+P(G)-P(R\cap G)

Since there are 7 red marbles, 5 green marbles and 3 green and red marbles among 13 marbles, we have:


\begin{gathered} P(R\cup G)=(7)/(13)+(5)/(13)-(3)/(13) \\ P(R\cup G)=(9)/(13) \end{gathered}

User Riba
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