Question

A study conducted on 40,000 words in the English language found that about 6,670 words started with the letter T, which is the most common letter to start a word. If we randomly pick 20 unique words, which of these lists of words will come closest to the theoretical probability of getting a word beginning with T?

Answer 1

Answer: Hi so your total samples are 40000 and 6670 start with T, so if we pick a random word of that 40000 we will have a 6670/40000 = 0.167 (or 16.7%) probability of picking one that starts with T.

So if i pick a list with 20 unique words and i want that have  the closest possible probability of getting a word starting with T as the one i had before, then:

if x are the total of words that start with t in our sample of 20 words.

then x/20 = 0.167 so x= 0.167*20 = 3.34

So the list with the closest possibility will be the list that has 3 words that start with T.

Answer 2

If we were to round down it would be 3/20