Question

An urn contains six red balls numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, two white balls numbered 7, 8, and two black balls numbered 9, 10. A ball is drawn from the urn. (Enter your probabilities as fractions.) (a) What is the probability that the ball is white

Answer 1

2/10 = 1/5

Explanation:

To figure out the probability of something, we can take

(number of outcomes of that something) / (number of total outcomes)

Here, we are trying to find the probability that the ball is white. The number of outcomes that are possible with the ball being white is 2, as there are two white balls and you can only pick one. You can pick either of the two white balls, but there is no way to pick one of them two times, pick two of them at once, or pick any other ball and have it be white.

The number of total outcomes is 10. There are 10 balls, and you can only pick one ball at a time. There are only 10 options to choose from.

Therefore, we can plug our numbers into the formula above and get 2/10 = 1/5 as our probability