PROBABILITY, STATISTICS AND RANDOM PROCESSES
PROBLEM SET5 – Durga Sivakumar
1. A student is planning to take the scholastic aptitude test (SAT) exam to gain admission
to a top college. She hopes to keep taking the exam until she gets a score of at least 2000
and then she will stop. Her score in any of the exams is uniformly distributed between 800
and 2000, and her score in one exam is independent of her score in any other exam.
i) What is the probability that she reaches her goal of scoring at least 2000 points in any
exam?
ii) What is the PMF of the number of times she will take the exam before reaching her goal?
iii). What is the expected number of times she will take the exam?
2. The time until a small meteorite first lands anywhere in the Sahara desert is modelled as
an exponential random variable with a mean of 10 days. The time is currently midnight.
What is the probability that a meteorite first lands sometime between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. of
the first day?
3. The elongation of a steel bar under a particular load has been established to be normally
distributed with a mean of 0.05 inch and σ = 0.01 inch. Find the probability that the
elongation is
(a) above 0.1 inch;
(b) below 0.04 inch;
(c) between 0.025 and 0.065 inch.
4. A certain type of device has an advertised failure rate of 0.01 per hour. The failure rate
is constant and the exponential distribution applies.
(a) What is the mean time to failure?
(b) What is the probability that 200 hours will pass before a failure is observed?
5. The exponential distribution is frequently applied to the waiting times between successes
in a Poisson process. If the number of calls received per hour by a telephone answering
service is a Poisson random variable with parameter λ = 6, we know that the time, in hours,
between successive calls has an exponential distribution with parameter β =1/6. What is the
probability of waiting more than 15 minutes between any two successive calls?