Question

List the simple events associated with the following experiment: as a part of a quality-control procedure, eight circuit boards are checked and the total number of defective boards is recorded.

Answer 1

A simple event is an event where all the outcomes are equally likely.

Suppose a dice, where you have 6 possible numbers, this will be a simple event if the probability to getting a given number is equal to the number of times that the given number is in the dice (1) divided by the total number of options:

p = 1/6

Here we have 8 circuits, and N is the number of defective ones.

Then the simple event can be written as:

P = N/8

this gives use the probability of selecting at random a defective circuit board.

Then the only simple event here is selecting circuit board, that can be defective or not (probability of selecting at random a defective one p = N/8, probability of selecting at random a non-defective one P = 1 - N/8)