Final answer:
The events of Maddie's volleyball and softball teams winning are independent, given no information suggests one affects the other's outcome.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question is asking whether the events of Maddie's volleyball team winning and her softball team winning are independent events. Two events are considered independent if the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of the occurrence of the other. In this scenario, there is no provided information indicating that the outcome of one game would affect the outcome of the other game. Therefore, assuming that the results of a volleyball game do not influence the results of a softball game, we can consider these events independent.
For a more formal definition, two events A and B are independent if the probability of both events occurring together (P(A AND B)) is equal to the product of their individual probabilities: P(A) * P(B). As no information was given to the contrary, we would assume that P(volleyball wins AND softball wins) equals P(volleyball wins) * P(softball wins), which signifies that the events are independent.