Question

The winner of a raffle will receive a 21 outboard boat. If 2000 raffle tickets were sold and you purchased 40 tickets, what are the odds against your winning the boat

Answer 1

Let A be the event "to win the raffle". We can picture that to win the raffle, we will choose randomly one of the tickets and that would be the winner.

To calculate the probability of event A, we simply will count the total number of possibilities we have to make event A true and divide it by the total number of possibilities.

In this case, if we choose randomly a raffle ticket, we would have 2000 possibilities to choose from. Now, to win the raffle, the ticket should be one of the ones we bought. That is, we only have 40 possibilities of having one of our tickets to be chosen.

Thus, we have that

`Pr(A)=(40)/(2000)=(4)/(200)=(1)/(50)`

so the odds of winning the raffle are 1 in 50.