Probability worksheet — GCSE Foundation

1.A game uses a fair spinner with 5 equal sections numbered 1 to 5. A player wins £12 if the spinner lands on 5, and wins nothing otherwise. It costs £2 to play. The game is played 250 times. Work out the expected profit for the players, in total, over the 250 games.

2.A café offers 3 types of sandwich, cheese, ham and egg, and 4 types of drink, tea, coffee, juice and water. A customer chooses one sandwich and one drink at random. Work out the probability that the customer chooses egg and water.

3.A bag contains 20 counters. 8 of the counters are red and 12 are blue. A counter is taken at random, its colour is recorded, and it is put back in the bag. This is done 150 times. Work out how many red counters you would expect to be recorded.

4.A student is estimating the probability that a spinner lands on red. In her first 85 spins it landed on red 34 times. She then spins it 165 more times, and in those it lands on red 58 times. Work out the best estimate of the probability of red from all 250 spins. Give your answer as a decimal, correct to 3 decimal places.

5.At a school fete, each raffle ticket wins a prize, wins a voucher or wins nothing, and no ticket can win more than one of these. The probability that a ticket wins a prize is 0.4 and the probability that it wins a voucher is 0.35. Work out the probability that a ticket wins a prize or a voucher.

6.The probability that Kofi passes his driving test on any attempt is 0.6, and each attempt is independent of the others. Work out the probability that he fails both his first two attempts.

7.Two fair spinners are each numbered 1, 2 and 3. Priya spins both spinners together and records the two numbers as a pair, listing every possible outcome systematically in a grid. Work out the probability that the two numbers are the same.

8.Two pupils each flip the same coin to estimate the probability of heads. Leah flips it 40 times and gets 24 heads. Ben flips it 60 times and gets 33 heads. By combining both pupils' results, work out the relative frequency of heads, giving your answer as a fraction in its simplest form.

9.A fair six-sided dice is rolled once. Write down the probability of rolling a 6.

10.A fair six-sided dice is rolled 300 times. Work out how many more times you would expect it to land on an even number than on a six.

11.A fair spinner has 8 equal sections: 5 are red and 3 are blue. Freya spins it twice, and each spin is independent of the other. Work out the probability that she gets one red and one blue in the two spins, in either order.

12.A tree diagram shows two rounds of a game, played independently. On each round, the probability of losing is 0.7 and the probability of winning is 0.3. Work out the probability of losing both rounds.

13.A frequency tree records the results of 160 patients who took a new medicine. It splits them into those who reported side effects and those who did not. 15% of the patients reported side effects. Work out how many of the 160 patients did not report side effects.

14.The probability that a seed fails to germinate is 1/5. Three seeds are planted independently. Work out the probability that at least one of the three seeds germinates.

15.A table shows how two Year 10 classes did in a spelling test. In class A, 18 out of 24 pupils passed. In class B, 21 out of 30 pupils passed. Which class had the greater proportion of pupils passing?