The number of telephone calls coming into Grace Floral Shop to place orders averages 3 per minute. (i) Define the random variable in this situation and list its values. (ii) Stating its parameter(s), what is the probability distribution of this variable? (iii) Compute the probability that 5 calls will arrive per minute.
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
The number of telephone calls coming into Grace Floral Shop to place orders averages 3 per minute.
(i) Define the random variable in this situation and list its values.
(ii) Stating its parameter(s), what is the probability distribution of this variable?
(iii) Compute the probability that 5 calls will arrive per minute.
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