Question

In Singapore, the main language is English, but only about 32% of households speak English as their primary language at home. 51% speak a Chinese language at home, 13% speak Malay, and many of the rest speak Tamil.

If I choose one thousand people randomly from all over the island, what is the probability that less than 120 speak Malay at home? Enter 0 if what we learned in class doesn't help us to answer this question. Otherwise, cut and paste your answer from Excel.
My professor uses Excel heavily so any Excel commands you may know to help solve this problem would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

Use the BINOM.DIST function in Excel with the parameters 119, 1000, and 0.13 to find the cumulative probability of fewer than 120 people speaking Malay out of a randomly selected sample of 1000 from Singapore.

Step-by-step explanation:

To determine the probability that less than 120 people speak Malay at home in a randomly selected group of 1000 people from Singapore, we can model the scenario with a binomial distribution since each person has a fixed probability of speaking Malay at home, and we are dealing with a fixed number of independent trials (i.e., selection of people).

Here's how we can calculate it using Excel:

1. First, define the following variables from the information given:
2. Next, use the Excel function BINOM.DIST to calculate the cumulative probability of x number of successes (in this case, x < 120).
3. Type the following formula into a cell to calculate the cumulative probability: =BINOM.DIST(119, 1000, 0.13, TRUE). This function will return the probability of there being 119 or fewer people who speak Malay at home.

Excel's BINOM.DIST function returns the cumulative probability associated with a binomial distribution.