I saw the following question on a multiple choice test. My answer is different than any of the choices. Can anyone help me determine which answer, if any, is correct?:
You are a member of a review team of seven department officers. The other six include two administrative officers, two economics officers, and two political officers. If you were to travel with two of them, selected at random, to your next site, what is the probability that you would be traveling with at least one economics officer.
Hmm. Haven’t taken math in a while but here’s my go at it.
First choose an officer at random. Notice there is no difference between an administrative or political.
Case A: (4 subjects) 1st officer is not economics.
The second officer will be an economics officer 2/5 of the time since there are 2 economics officers left out of 5.
Since there are four of these, there are 8 out of 20 possibilities where objectives are met.
Case B: (2 subjects) 1st officer is economics.
The second officer doesn’t matter. No matter which of the 5 is randomly picked, the objectives are met.
There are two of these. 10 out of 10 possibilities here.
Total number of (unordered) pairs of people, out of 6, is 6C2 = 15
Some of these pairs will feature two non-economists. How many? Since there are four non-economists, it’s 4C2 = 6.
Thus of the 15 possibilities, 6 will have zero economists, so 9 must have one or two. 9/15 = 0.6.
The problem with your analysis, if it’s the same as Q.E.D.'s, is that not all nine combinations are equally likely. For instance, AE is twice as likely as AA.
Valgard has the best answer. When solving probability problems such as the OP, it may be easier to compute the probability of the given event NOT happening.