A fairly simple probability question ( I think)

[Rampuss]

Hoping someone can help me with this,

Say I have 50 cats, 13 are ginger and 37 are tabby. I need to pick 17 out at random. What is the probability as a percentage that out of the 17 I pick 12 will be ginger?


My maths isn’t very good, it’s why I drive a truck for a living lol, but hopefully this will be fairly easy for someone better educated.

Regards

jamie

 

[Dr.Peterson]

Say I have 50 cats, 13 are ginger and 37 are tabby. I need to pick 17 out at random. What is the probability as a percentage that out of the 17 I pick 12 will be ginger?

My maths isn’t very good, it’s why I drive a truck for a living lol, but hopefully this will be fairly easy for someone better educated.

We've had trouble on the site with moderation (not the moderators' fault), which accounts the delay in seeing this. It's also not your fault.

First, some context would be helpful: If this isn't for school, what is it for? Our goal is to help you learn, so we need to have some idea what you know, that we could help you use. (We don't give complete answers, unless it is clear that you have a reason other than education.) Also, the context may tell us whether you need exactly 12 ginger, or perhaps at least 12, or at most 12, which may be more useful.

As for the work, if you know anything about combinations, you can find the number of ways to choose 12 of 13 G's, and the number of ways to choose 5 of 37 T's. Then you can multiply these together, and divide by the total number of ways to choose 17 out of 50 cats, ignoring types (treating the cats as distinguishable, but ignoring order).

Or, if you just want a formula (which you probably would not have learned), you can look up the hypergeometric distribution.

 

[Rampuss]

I do apologise but I created another account and have asked a very similar but more precise question on there, I will close this down and answer everything on that thread.

Seeing the line through my question made me think it had been declined and wasn’t awaiting approval.

Apologies, I should have waited

Regards

Jamie