Probability worksheet — GCSE Foundation

1.A phone network sends automatic text alerts to customers. On average, 1,500 alerts are sent each day, and the probability that a customer replies 'STOP' to an alert is 0.18. Work out how many replies of 'STOP' the network should expect over a 30-day month.

2.Kwame flips a fair coin three times and writes down what it lands on each time. Work out the probability that it lands on heads all three times.

3.Two fair four-sided dice, numbered 1 to 4, are rolled and the two scores are added together. Work out the probability that the total is 5.

4.The universal set is {1, 2, 3, ..., 15}. A = {multiples of 3}. Work out n(A′), the number of elements not in A.

5.A market research company found that, out of 120 shoppers surveyed, 42 preferred paper bags to plastic bags. A supermarket expects 900 shoppers this week. Using this relative frequency, work out how many of the 900 shoppers would be expected to prefer paper bags.

6.Two sets, A and B, sit inside a universal set. A region of a Venn diagram is described by the notation A ∩ B′. Work out which of these describes that region.

7.Two ordinary fair dice are rolled and the two scores are multiplied together. Work out the probability that the product is odd.

8.At a school fête, a tombola stall costs £1.50 to play. The probability of winning is 0.2, and the prize is worth £6. Work out the stall's expected profit, on average, from each game played.

9.An ordinary fair dice is rolled once. Set A is the set of even scores and set B is the set of scores greater than 4. Work out the probability that the score rolled is in set A or in set B or in both.

10.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.

11.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.

12.A card is taken at random from an ordinary pack of 52 playing cards. The probability that the card is a diamond is 1/4. Work out the probability that the card is not a diamond.

13.At a gym, 70 members are asked whether they use the pool or the sauna. 38 use the pool, 30 use the sauna, and 12 use neither. Work out n(P ∩ S), the number of members who use both the pool and the sauna.

14.A school trip took 200 pupils to a museum, travelling either by coach or by minibus. A frequency tree records the trip: 150 pupils travelled by coach, split into 90 in Year 8 and the rest in Year 9. All the pupils who travelled by minibus were in Year 8. Work out the total number of Year 8 pupils on the trip.

15.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.