Table of Contents
What is the probability of having two boys and two girls?
There are 4C2 ways to have exactly 2 boys & 2 girls, in any order, so this gives 6/16 =3/8 as the correct probability.
What is the probability that the family has at least 1 girl?
There’s a 50\% chance that any given child is a girl, so take . 5 to the 4th power and subtract it from 1, which gives you a 93.75\% chance that at least one child is a girl. Let us assume that there are only two possibilities for a child- either a boy or a girl, and both are equally likely.
What is the probability of a family having a girl?
Data from the US and Scandinavia show that the true figure is more like 51\% for a boy and 49\% for a girl. In addition statistics show that the probability of the child having a specific sex is correlated with the sex of the previous children.
What is the probability of all three children being girls?
The probability of all three children being girls is the same as that as being all boys, 1 8. And so the probability of the children being all boys or all girls is: P (all boys or all girls) = 1 8 + 1 8 = 1 4
What is the probability of having no boys in each generation?
Conversely the chance of having no boys is 1 / 2 in the first generation, 1 / 4 in the second, and 1 / 8 in the third. This generalizes to 1 / 2 n in the nth generation. (Essentially I’ve drawn a probability tree diagram here, which generalizes to much more complicated problems).
How many possible combinations of 2 boys and a girl?
As we have seen from the other answers, there are 3 permutations out of 8 which contain 2 boys and a girl. But what if we looked at the combinations instead? The combinations of 2 genders among 3 children are: 2 girls, 1 boy can be rearranged, and the boy can have 3 positions (youngest, middle or oldest).
What are the odds of having a baby in each generation?
You can see that the chance of having at least one boy is 1 / 2 in the first generation, 3 / 4 in the second, and 7 / 8 in the third. This generalizes to ( 2 n − 1) / 2 n in the nth generation.