Video: Determining the Probability of an Event of Choosing a Letter from a Given Word

Video Transcript

If a letter is randomly selected from the word Valencia, what is the probability that it is an e?

The probability of an event equals the number of favorable outcomes over the total number of outcomes. The event we’re interested in is the chances that we would select e.

If we look at the word Valencia, there is only one e, so our favorable outcome, our chance of selecting e, is one. What is the total outcomes here? What should go in the denominator?

When we’re dealing with selecting letters from a word, the total number of outcomes would be the number of letters in the word. The word Valencia has eight letters. If you randomly selected a letter from the word Valencia, the probability that you would select e is one out of eight.