Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology

B.Tech Aerospace, EC & Engineering Physics, September 2021

2. From a lot of 10 missiles, 4 are selected at random and fixed. If the lot contains 3 defective missiles
that will not fire, what is the probability that

(a) All 4 will fire?

3. The probability that a student pilot passes the written test for a private pilot’s license is 0.7. Find
the probability that the student will pass the test

(a) On the third day.

4. Computer technology has produced an environment in which robots operate with the use of micro
processors. The probability that a robot fails during any 6 hour shift is 0.10. What is the probability
that a robot will operate atmost 5 shifts before it fails?

5. A certain machine makes electrical resistors having a mean resistance of 40 ohms and a standard
deviation of 2 ohms. Assuming that the resistance follows normal distribution and can be measured
to any degree of accuracy, what percentage of resistors will have a resistance exceeding 43 ohms?

6. The average life of a certain type of small motor is 10 years with a standard deviation of 2 years.
The manufacturer replaces free all motors that fail, while under guarantee. If he is willing to
replace only 3% of the motors that fail, how long a guarantee should he offer, assuming that the
lifetime of a motor follows normal distribution.

7. A Company produces component parts for an engine. Parts specification suggest that 95% of items
meet specifications. The parts are shopped to customers in lots of 100.

(a) What is the probability that more than 2 items will be defective in a given lot.
(b) What is the probability that more than 10 items will be defective in a lot?

8. The Probability that a patient recovers from a delicate heart operation is 0.9. Of the next 100
patients having this operation, What is the probability that

(a) Between 84 and 95 indusive survive?

9. Find the probability that none of three bulbs in a traffic signal will have to be replaced during
the first 1500 hours of operation if the lifetime X of a bulb is a random variable with the density
f (x) = 6[0.25 − (x − 1.5)2 ] when 1 ≤ x ≤ 2 and f (x) = 0 otherwise, where x is measured in
multiples of 1000 hours.

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10. A fair coin is tossed 7 times. Find the probability that the head appears in the seventh trial for
the fourth time.
11. If the mathematics scores of an entrance examination are normal with mean 480 and standard
deviation 100 and if some college sets 500 as the minimum score for new students, what percentage
of students would not reach that score?
12. If sick-leave time X used by employees of a company in one month is approximately normal with
mean 1000 hours and standard deviation 100 hours, how much time t should be budgeted for sick
leave during the next month if t is to be exceeded with probability of only 20%?
13. If three suspects who committed a burglary and six innocent persons are lined up, what is the
probability that a witness who is not sure and has to pick three persons will pick the three suspects
by chance? That the witness picks three innocent persons by chance?
14. If the life of certain tires (in thousands of miles) has the density function f (x) = θ e−θx (x > 0),
what mileage can you expect to get on one of these tires? Let θ = 0.05 and find the probability
that a tire will last at least 30,000 miles.
15. If the probability of hitting a target is 0.25 and 4 shots are fired independently, what is the
probability that the target will be hit at least once?
16. Suppose that 4 percentage of steel rods made by a machine are defective, the defective occurring at
random during production. If the rods are packaged 100 per box, what is the Poisson approximation
of the probability that a given box will contain x = 0, 1, ...5 defective?
17. If X is the number of cars per minute passing a certain point of a country road between 11 P.M
and 12 P.M and X has a Poisson distribution with mean 5, what is the probability of observing
fewer than 5 cars during any given minute?
18. If the lifetime X of a certain kind of automobile battery is normally distributed with a mean of 5
years and a standard deviation of 1 year, and the manufacturer wishes to guarantee the battery
for 4 years, what percentage of the batteries will he have to replace under the guarantee?
19. Suppose that in one year the average number of industrial accidents is 3. What is the probability
that in a given year there will be at least 1 accident?
20. A radioactive source emits on the average 2.5 particles per micro-second. Calculate the probability
that 2 or more particles will be emitted in an interval of 4 micro-second.
21. The number of customers arriving per hour at a certain automobile service facility is assumed to
follow a Poisson distribution with mean λ = 7.
(a) Compute the probability that more than 10 customers will arrive in a 2-hour period.
(b) What is the mean number of arrivals during a 2-hour period?
22. Let R1 and R2 be two random variables such that R1 ∼ b(n, p) and R2 ∼ b(m, p). Find joint
probability distribution of R1 and R2 . Also find P (R1 = j|R1 + R2 = k) where k ≤ m + n.
23. In an exam, the mean score of the students is 70 and the variance is 16. What is the probability
that a students score will lie within the 54 and 86? What percentage of students will lie within 2
standard deviations on either side of the mean score?
24. Error in an experiment follows a distribution with mean .001 and variance .04. What can you
say about the probability that the error will not exceed 50% of the standard deviations from the
mean?

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25. An unbiased coin is tossed 40,000 times. With proper explanation calculate the approximate value
of the probability that number of heads occurs in the experiment is at least 20,050? Given that
Φ(.05) = 0.3085.

26. An urn contains 25 paisa and 50 paisa coins. Given that the number of 50 paisa coins while picking
up, with replacement, 200 coins is approximately 8. With proper explanation, find the probability
that the number of 50 paisa coin will be 10 during the experiment. Given that F (9) = 0.7166 and
F (10) = 0.8159, where F (.) denotes the cdf of Poisson distribution.

27. A 10 meter by 10 meter plot of land, is divided into a grid of 100 squares. 300 seeds are scattered
on this plot. Assume that each seed falls at random, so that it is equally likely to fall on any of
the 100 squares. Consider the square in the upper left hand corner. What is the probability that
exactly 4 seeds fall in it? What is the probability that 0 seeds fall in it?

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