double trouble
Mar. 24th, 2010 11:20 pmMorgan's homework today included this problem (reproduced here verbatim):
This seems like a remarkably sophisticated problem to assign a sixth-grader. It looks like it would have been a reasonable problem for my probability midterm in high school. Does anyone here disagree?
Edit: The problem was not made up or handwritten by the math teacher -- it was submitted as part of a Math 4 Today handout that he gets assigned on a weekly basis. For better or for worse, this was part of a standard curriculum math workbook. (And they wonder is our children learning anything!)
If you have one dice with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Expressed as a fraction, what is the probability of rolling a double (2 of the same number) in 25 rolls?The probability that at least one number will come up twice is clearly 100%. We're assuming that they're asking for the probability that at some point two consecutive rolls will turn up the same number.
This seems like a remarkably sophisticated problem to assign a sixth-grader. It looks like it would have been a reasonable problem for my probability midterm in high school. Does anyone here disagree?
Edit: The problem was not made up or handwritten by the math teacher -- it was submitted as part of a Math 4 Today handout that he gets assigned on a weekly basis. For better or for worse, this was part of a standard curriculum math workbook. (And they wonder is our children learning anything!)