lookoutastroboy said:
just one more question if you please?
11 Rachael purchases a townhouse ‘off the plan’ and the builder offers her a choice of colours
for interior painting. The walls can be cream, light blue or light green, and the ceilings vivid
white or off-white. Different colours may be chosen for different rooms but only two
colours can be used in any room (one for the ceiling and one for the walls). The townhouse
consists of four rooms; living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. It is all so confusing
that Rachael makes random selections for each room.
a What is the number of possible colour schemes for Rachael’s townhouse?
b What is the probability that:
i the bedroom has cream walls and a vivid white ceiling?
ii the living room and the bedroom have the same colour schemes?
iii no ceiling is off-white?
iv all the walls are of the same colour?
v at least two rooms have identical colour schemes?
thanks again for all your help, lookoutastroboy (p.s. why is probability so hard!?)
a) This is a counting problem. There are 3 colours for the walls and 2 colours for the ceiling. Further more, there can only be two colours in a room. Seeing as both the wall and ceiling have to be painted. So for each room, there will be 3 x 2 = 6 ways to arrange these colours. This is because you can use any of the three wall colours and then from that choose anyone of the two ceiling colours, using the multiplication principal, this becomes 6 ways.
The multiplication principal is a basic principal in combinatorics, another, harder, way is to use a tree diagram, then add all the last branches.
Anyway, to continue, we have 6 ways to choose the colours for a room. There are a total of 8 rooms, and so, again using the multiplication principal (dont worry if you dont know), there is 6 x 8 ways or 48 ways.
b) Okay, we can draw a tree diagram to answer the question, the first branches are cream light blue light green
from these three branches there are the two branches vivid white vivid off white. The probability for the colour of each wall is 1/3 and for each ceiling it is 1/2. Then we follow the cream walls branch and the vivid white branch, multiply the probability and get 1/3 x 1/2 = 1/6
(We could also have realised that combination {cream, white} is one possible combination of the six, ergo the prob is 1/6)
ii) This is a hard one to explain, i would assume that the text book has some kind of formula for this but because i havent done probability in one and a half years i like to use tree diagrams.
For me, i visulize a tree diagram such that we have the three branches for the first rooms first wall colour and then extending from then the first room ceiling colour and then from those the second rooms wall colour and so on. As you could imagine, it looks messy.
P(b,w,b,w) = 1/3 x 1/2 x 1/3 x 1/2
= 1/6 x 1/6
= 1/36
This is if both the two rooms in blue and white. So if we imagine that we choose say g, w. Then the prob will be 1/36. So we postulate that we multiply the number of same colour combinations by this probability. I think there will be six that are the same, because we have 6 different ways of doing the colours.
So the probability is,
6 x 1/36 = 1/6
I will try do the other later, just going out right now