If a seed is planted, it has a 70% chance of growing into a healthy plant. If 8 seeds are planted, what is the probability that exactly 1 doesn't grow?

Answer 1

If the seed has a 70% change of growing into a healthy plant, it has a 30% chance of not growing.

If we think of each seed as an independent trial, there are two outcomes (grow, not grow), a fixed number of trials (8) and a constant probability (0.3) of not growing, when means the status of the seed is a binomial variable and we can compute probabilities using a binomial distribution.

The probability of 1 not grow in 8 tries with a probability of 0.3

C 1 7

8 1 0.3 0.7 = 0.19765