Indian Institute of Management

Ahmedabad
PGP-I/ABM-I

TB/NR/ KS
PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS
Slot 1 Final Exam

Duration: 2 hours

Maximum Marks: 100

Please read Instructions before you begin.

1. PLEASE WRITE DOWN YOUR NAME, ROLL NUMBER AND SECTION.
2. THIS IS AN OPEN BOOK, OPEN CLASSNOTES EXAM.
3. No clarification will be provided. Wherever necessary, please make suitable assumptions
and specify the same.
4. Please read the questions carefully before answering. Please write your answers in the
space provided. Borrow additional sheets if needed.
5. Your work must be neat and legible. All rough calculations should be shown.
6. Clearly define any random variables or events you may use and clearly specify the
probability distributions of the random variables used. State any relevant assumptions
you are making. If you are directly using any known results from class discussions,
clearly state the result being used. Your answers must be supported by proper
explanations and steps. Computation needs to be correct up to two places of decimal.
Unless you follow these instructions, marks will be deducted.
7. Process of answering a question is equally important as the final result. Partial credits
are not always guaranteed.
8. You must answer with a blue or blank pen. Use of pencil is not allowed.
9. You may use a calculator. However, use of cell phones, laptops and other electronic
devices is not allowed.
10. Please make sure you hand over the completed papers and any additional sheets before
leaving the examination hall. These will not be accepted later.
All the best !
NAME : ____________________________________________
ROLL NUMBER : ___________________________________________
SECTION : ___________
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Question 1. (20 Marks)

Answer the following questions by providing a brief justification for your answer.
a. (2 marks) 60% of MPs in the parliament voted in favour of bill A. 20% of MPs in the
same parliament voted in favour of bill B. This means at least 20% of the MPs neither
favour bill A nor favour bill B. TRUE or FALSE? Explain.

b. (2 marks) If A and B are disjoint (mutually exclusive) events with positive probability
of occurrence, then they must be independent. TRUE or FALSE? Explain.

c. (2 marks) If X ~Binomial (n=5, p=.5) and Y~ Binomial (n=5, p=.2) are independent
random variables, find P(X+Y>0)

d. (2 marks) A bus is scheduled for departure at 8 AM. The arrival time of a passenger
who wishes to catch this bus is uniformly distributed between 7:30 am and 8 am.
What is the expected waiting time (in minutes) for the passenger from the time he
arrives until the departure of the bus?

e. (2 marks) The service time at a bank window is known to be exponentially

distributed with mean service time = 10 minutes. When Person A arrives, he is next
in line to person B who is currently still at the window and by then has already been
served for the last 5 minutes. Person A needs to wait until Person B is fully served.
What is the expected waiting time for person A ?

f. (2 marks) If the exam scores of a certain batch of students can be approximated by

a normal distribution with mean 75 and standard deviation 2.5. What score
corresponds to the 99th percentile?

g. (2 marks) 5 out of a batch of 25 students in a management school wished to do an

internship with a major political party. That year, the political party randomly
selected 3 different students from these 25 students. What is the probability that 2
of these 3 happen to be among the 5 who wished to be interning with them?

h. (2 marks) A biased coin with probability of heads=1/4 is tossed independently until

two successive heads occur. Let X= number of tosses until and including the two
successive heads. What is P(X=4)?

i. (2 marks) For an exponential distribution with mean=2, 50thpercentile is more than

2. TRUE or FALSE? Explain.

j. (2 marks) A bag contains equal number of coins of two types, viz., type A and type B.
For coin of type A: P(heads)=1/4 and for type B: P(heads)=1/2. A coin was randomly
picked up from the bag and tossed once. Given that the toss resulted in heads, what
is the probability that the coin was of type A?

Question 2. (20 Marks)

A company aims to sell as many CDs as possible over the next 30 days. There are two types
of CDs, viz (i) classical music and (ii) rock music. The company found from the past data that
on a randomly chosen day, the probability distribution of the number of music CDs sold of
each type is as shown below. The sales of CDs across different days and types are
independent.
Number of Classical Music
CDs sold in a day
Probability

Number of Rock Music

CDs sold in a day
Probability

0
0.1

0
0.2

500
0.2

1000
0.3

1000
0.7

2000
0.5

a. (10 Marks) Find the probability distribution of the total number of music CDs (i.e.
classical + rock) sold on a randomly chosen day.

b. (5 Marks) What is the expected value and standard deviation of the total number of
CDs that will be sold in the next 30 days?

c. (5 Marks) Using Central Limit Theorem, find the probability that the company will be
able to sell at least 70000 CDs in the next 30 days?

Question 3. (20 Marks)

Three students from a management school decided to appear for a job interview in a
reputed firm. The job interview had two levels, viz. I and II. A candidate moves to
the second level (i.e. level II) only if she passes the first level (i.e. level I). From past
experience, it is known that for a student in level I there is a 30% chance of passing
and for a student entering level II there is a 10% chance of passing. For these three
students who appear for the job interview, let X= number of students who pass level
I and Y = number of students who pass level II. Assume students perform
independently of each other in the interviews.
a. (5 Marks) Find the probability distribution of X?

b. (10 Marks) Find the joint distribution of X and Y.

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c. (5 Marks) Hence find the marginal distribution of Y.

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Question 4. (20 Marks)

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Students from engineering and science colleges prepare over an extended period of
several years to appear for a competitive examination. A candidate can take up to
five attempts to qualify in the competitive exam. After each examination, the
candidates are evaluated as either qualified or failed. The outcomes from different
attempts are independent for an individual and also across individuals. Also, assume
that the student sticks to the same mode of preparation over different attempts.
Relevant details on the different approaches students may take to prepare are
provided in the table below.

1
2

Preparation
Mode
Self Study
Coaching Class

Probability of
Qualification in a
given attempt
0.4
0.7

Percentage of students
taking this mode to
prepare
70%
20%

Personalized
training

0.8

10%

a. (10 Marks) What is the probability that a randomly chosen candidate qualifies in the
4th attempt?

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b. (10 Marks) Given that a candidate qualified on the 4th attempt, what is the
probability that he prepared by self-study?

Question 5. (5 + 10 + 5)
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Consider an electronic system comprising 5 components, say, C1, C2,,C5. The system works
only if all of the following conditions are fulfilled:
(i) both C1 and C2 work,
(ii) at least one of C3 and C4 works,
and (iii) C5 works.
Suppose the life times (in years) of C1,C2,,C5 are distributed independently as exponential
random variable with means 5, 5, 6, 6, 6 respectively.
(a) (5 Marks) For each component, find the probability that it will work for at least 5
years.

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(b) (10 Marks) Find the probability that the system will work for at least 5 years.

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(c) (5 Marks) Given that the component C3 just failed, what is the probability that the
system will work for 2 more years?

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