If a cat is pregnant with kittens, what is the probability of guessing each sex of the kitten AND guessing the number of kittens a pregnant cat will have.

Question

I had a dream that my pregnant cat had four kittens, three boys and one girl, and all of them were healthy. No kittens died. What is the probability of that actually happening? Yeah, the dream did come true.

Answer 1

Hi there,

This sounds like a Binomial distribution problem considering you have a certain number of "trials' given probabilities and number of successes.

_nC_x p^xq^n-x

n=4 (4 kittens, aka trials)

x=3 (take the number of successes to be the number if boys)

p=1/2 (50% chance of "success" (chance of having a boy))

q=1/2 (50% chance of "failure" (chance of having a girl))

₄C₃ *0.5³(0.5)¹= 4/16 = 1/4.

I hope this helps!