Question

Leslie is a biologist. She is going to randomly select one animal from her lab to study. There are

5
55 salamanders,
3
33 crayfish, and
12
1212 minnows in her lab.
What is
P(salamander
)
P(salamander)start text, P, left parenthesis, s, a, l, a, m, a, n, d, e, r, end text, right parenthesis?

Answer 1

The probability that Leslie randomly selects a salamander is

1

4

4

1

Explanation:

In general, when we are interested in finding the probability of a event, we just need to divide the number of possibilities the event we are interested in can happens by the number of all possible results.

In this case, we have

20

20 differents animals to be chosen and we are interested in when one of the five salamanders is chosen. That is, P(salamander) =

5

20

=

1

4

20

5

=

4

1