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?

Question

Clarence Ellison

Mathematics

15 May, 00:33

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?

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Alisa Key · Answer 1

The theoretical possibility closest for this list would be one that would have 3 words starting with the letter "T".

To find this we first have to decide what percentage of words start with "T". So we divide the number of "T" words by the total number of words.

6,670/40,000 = 16.675%

Then we take that percentage and multiply it by the amount of words in the lists.

20 * 16.675% = 3.335 words

Since we can't have fractional words here, we would round down to 3 words in the list.