Question

In 1935, Harvard linguist George Zipf I wanted out that the frequency of the Kth most frequent word in a language is roughly proportional to 1/K. This implies that the second most frequent word in a language has a frequency of one half that of the most frequent word, the third most frequent word has a frequency of one third that of the most frequent word, and so on. A distribution that follows this rule is said to obay Zipf's law.
Zipf's lawhas been observed not only in word distributions, but in other phenomenona as well, such as populations in a city.


The frequency of the third most frequent word in the Brown corpus is ___?___ that of the most frequent word.


A. 41%

B. 34%

C. 33%

D. 50%

Answer 1

Answer:

C. 33%

Step-by-step explanation:

The frequency of the Kth most frequent word in a language is roughly proportional to 1/K of the most frequent word.

So the 2nd most frequent word is roughly proportional to 1/2 of the most frequent word

The 3rd most frequent word is roughly proportional to 1/3 = 0.333 = 0.33 of the most frequent word.

0.333 is rounded to 0.33 = 33%.

If it had been 0.335 or higher, it would be round to 0.34 = 34%.

So the correct answer is:

C. 33%