Question

A bag contains twelve balls labeled 1 through 12. One ball will be randomly picked.

What is the probability of picking an even number?
Write your answer as a fraction in simplest form

Answer 1

Hello there!

If a bag has 12 balls labelled 1 through 12, that means that the balls inside the bag includes:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

When creating a fraction for a probability, the numerator usually consists of a specific probability you are trying to find; the denominator usually consists of the total amount of samples in the bag.

In this example: What is the probability of picking an even number?

Ask yourself: What are we trying to find?

We are trying to find the probability of even numbers.

Then ask yourself: What is the amount of possibilities that we can get an even number from the bag?

The bag consists of: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Even numbers are divisible by 2 and has a remainder of 0 ; which means in this bag, the bolded numbers are even.

Then we can conclude that in this bag, counting all of the bolded numbers, we have 6 possibilities of choosing an even number.

Finally, think about: What is the total amount of samples in this bag?

We know that there are 12 balls, so 12 would be the total amount.

To conclude, we can find 6 even numbers in a bag of 12 balls;

Therefore, the chances you can pick an even number is
`(6)/(12) ,` or
`(1)/(2)`.