Question

On a game show, a contestant randomly chooses a chip from a bag that contains numbers and strikes. The theoretical probability of choosing a strike is 3/10. The bag contains 9 strikes. How many chips are in the bag?

Answer 1

This question rests on the proportion 3/10, and how that might scale up to a larger bag. It says the probability of choosing a strike is 3/10; we can take that to mean that, in a bag of 10 chips, there are 3 strikes. Now, we're dealing with an unknown number of chips, but we are given the number of strikes it contains: 9. What are we multiplying - or scaling - the 3 by to get 9? We'll have to use that same scaling factor to scale up our 10. As an equation, this translates to:


`(3)/(10)= (9)/(x)`

Where x is the number of chips in the larger bag.