Roll No.

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Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham

Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore
B.Tech. Degree Examinations – April/May 2018
Fourth Semester
(Mechanical Engineering
& Electrical and Electronics Engineering)
15MAT214 Probability and Statistics
[Time: Three hours Maximum: 100 Marks]
Answer all questions
PART A (10 x 3 =30 Marks)

1. In a certain residential suburb, of all households subscribe to the metropolitan

newspaper published in a nearby city, subscribe to the local paper and of
all households subscribe to both papers. If a household is selected at random, what is
the probability that it subscribes to (a) at least one of the two newspapers and
(b) exactly one of the two newspapers?

2. Two airplanes bomb a target in succession. The probability of each correctly scoring a
hit is and respectively. The second will bomb only if the first misses the
target. Find the probability that (a) target is hit (b) both fail to score hits.

3. Let be a discrete random variable with values . Find the value of , if

possible, such that the following is its probability mass function. Justify your answer.

X 0 1 2 3
f(X) k 2k k k2–4

4. A radioactive material will exist for at most two days and the probability of the
amount of material left is directly proportional to the cube of the time it lasted. Find
the probability density function of the material left.

5. Let’s say that of all business startups in the IT industry report that they generate
a profit in their first year. If a sample of new IT business startups is selected, find
the probability that exactly seven will generate a profit in their first year.

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 6. (a) If a production line has a defective rate, what is the average number of
inspections to obtain the first defective?
(b) What is the probability that more than items are to be inspected before getting
first defective?

7. State and prove Chebyshev’s inequality.

8. The amount of time that a customer spends waiting at an airport check-in counter is a
random variable with mean and standard deviation .
Suppose that a random sample of customers is observed. Use central limit
theorem to find the probability that the average time waiting in line for these
customers is between and .

9. It is decided to test the hypothesis that the average weight of a male student in a
certain college is with a standard deviation of . It is further decided to
reject the above hypothesis, based on a random sample of size 32, if the sample mean
is below or above . Find the probability of type I error.

10. Show that the sample variance is an unbiased estimator for the population variance

PART B (5 x 6 =30 Marks)

11. The probability that students and solve a problem are and ,

respectively. If all of them try to solve the problem

(a) What is the probability that exactly one of them solves the problem?
(b) What is the probability that none of them solves the problem?
(c) What is the probability that the problem is solved?

12. (a) A man draws balls from an urn containing white and black balls. He gets
for each white ball and Rs.5 for each black ball. On an average, find the
amount the man may get.

(b) Given a random variable with probability density function ( ) for

find and hence find the CDF of .

13. (a) Screws are being supplied in packets of each. On an average it is known that
the probability of a screw being defective is . If such packets are sent to
the customer, find the number of packets having more than defective screws using
Poisson approximation of Binomial distribution.
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 (b) The drying time of a glue is known to be uniformly distributed in .
The customers reject the product if the drying time exceeds . Find the
(i) Average drying time and standard deviation of the drying time (ii) Probability for
rejection.

14. Let be a random variable with the following probability distribution:

( )
( ) {

Find the maximum likelihood estimator of based on a random sample of size . Also
compute the estimated parameter from the following sample of values
and .

15. From the past records, it is found that the mean breaking strength of the cables
supplied by a manufacturer is , with SD of . By a new
technique in the manufacturing process, it is claimed that the breaking strength of the
cable has increased. To test this claim, a sample of 50 cables is tested and it is found
that the mean breaking strength is 1850 units. Can we support the claim at level
of significance?

PART C (5 x 8 =40 Marks)

16. In a certain assembly plant, three machines and make and ,

respectively, of the products. It is known from past experience that and
of the products made by these machine, respectively, are defective. A finished product
is chosen randomly.
(a) What is the probability that it is defective?
(b) What is the probability that it was made by machine given that it was
defective?
(c) What is the probability that it was not made by machine given that it was
non- defective?
17. A continuous random variable has a probability density function

( ) { ( )

Find (a) (b) ( ) (c) ( ) (d) ( ).

18. (a) Obtain the moment generating function of the exponential distribution and hence
find its mean and variance.
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 (b) Suppose that the birth weight of babies is normally distributed with mean
and standard deviation . If ( ) , find

19. A particular brand of diet margarine was analyzed to determine the level of
polyunsaturated fatty acid (in percentages). A sample of six packages resulted in the
following data: . Assuming that the level of
polyunsaturated fatty acid in diet is normally distributed,
(a) Find a confidence interval on the mean μ.
(b) Determine a confidence interval for the variance .

20. The nicotine contents in two random samples of tobacco are given below:
Sample 1:
Sample 2 :
Assuming that the populations follow normal distribution, can you say that the two
samples came from the same population at level of significance?

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