Video Transcript
There are 28 people in a
meeting. The probability that a person
chosen at random is a man is one-half. Calculate the number of women in
the meeting.
Here, we’re told that there are 28
people in the meeting. If we pick a person at random, then
the probability of selecting a man is one-half. We can use these two pieces of
information to help us work out the number of women there must be in the
meeting. We can use the equation that the
probability of an event is equal to the number of possible outcomes over the total
number of outcomes. One of the ways we can approach
this question is because we know the probability of selecting a man, we can work out
the number of men in the meeting. The probability of picking a man is
equal to the number of men over the total number of people.
We’re given that the probability of
picking a man is one-half. The number of men is what we want
to find out, and the total number of people is the number of people in the
meeting. That’s 28. In order to simplify this, we can
multiply both sides by 28. And since a half multiplied by 28
is 14, we now know that the number of men is 14. So if there’s 28 people in total in
the room, either men or women, and 14 of those are men, then subtracting that would
give us 14. So we can give the answer then that
there must be 14 women in the meeting.
