Probability help

Question

The table below shows the number of deaths in the U.S. in a year due to a variety of causes. For these questions, assume these values are not changing from year to year, and that the population of the United States is 312 million people.

Cause Deaths Passenger car occupant (driver or rider) 13,100 Motorcycle (driver or rider) 4,500

Tornado 553

Skydiving 56

e) Estimate the probability that you will die as the result of a tornado next year?

why is this answer different than the probability for an american chosen at random?

Answer 1

If one were to assume that tornados occur randomly across the United States, then the answer would be 553 out of 312,000,000 and 553/312,000,000 = 0.000164%

However, I live in a place that doesn't really have tornados (although they have been reported before). So, although the probability for me would be very close to zero, it is not quite zero. I don't know about where you live.

The answer to the last question "why is this answer different than the probability for an American chosen at random?" is that tornados do NOT occur randomly (some locations are far more likely to have a tornado than others) for instance, Alaska has had only 4 tornados since 1950 (when record keeping began) however, there were still 3 deaths in one of them so even Alaska does not have a zero % probability.