Write a paragraph discussing the following:

Question

a. Michael says that if you flip a coin 100 times, it will have to come up heads 50 times out of the 100. Is Michael correct?

b. If the probability that a certain outcome of an experiment will occur is 30%, does that mean that when you carry out the experiment 100 times, the outcome will occur 30 of those times?

Answer 1

(a) There is a 50% chance that a coin comes up heads. That means if you flip a coin a large number of times (> 1000) you will approximately get heads half the time. You cannot predict when the heads will occur, only that in the group of flips about half will be heads. 100 is not sufficiently large to say that about 50 out of the 100 will be heads.

(b) No. For the same reasoning as (a).