S7 Exercises

Poisson distribution examples

1. The number of road construction projects that take place at any one time in a certain city follows a Poisson distribution with a mean of 3. Find the probability that exactly five road construction projects are currently taking place in this city. (0.100819)

2. The number of road construction projects that take place at any one time in a certain city follows a Poisson distribution with a mean of 7. Find the probability that more than four road construction projects are currently taking place in the city. (0.827008)

3. The number of traffic accidents that occur on a particular stretch of road during a month follows a Poisson distribution with a mean of 7.6. Find the probability that less than three accidents will occur next month on this stretch of road. (0.018757)

4. The number of traffic accidents that occur on a particular stretch of road during a month follows a Poisson distribution with a mean of 7. Find the probability of observing exactly three accidents on this stretch of road next month. (0.052129)

5. The number of traffic accidents that occur on a particular stretch of road during a month follows a Poisson distribution with a mean of 6.8. Find the probability that the next two months will both result in four accidents each occurring on this stretch of road. (0.009846)

6. Suppose the number of babies born during an 8-hour shift at a hospital's maternity wing follows a Poisson distribution with a mean of 6 an hour. Find the probability that five babies are born during a particular 1-hour period in this maternity wing. (0.160623)

7. The university policy department must write, on average, five tickets per day to keep department revenues at budgeted levels. Suppose the number of tickets written per day follows a Poisson distribution with a mean of 8.8 tickets per day. Find the probability that less than six tickets are written on a randomly selected day from this distribution. (0.128387)

8. The number of goals scored at State College hockey games follows a Poisson distribution with a mean of 3 goals per game. Find the probability that each of four randomly selected State College hockey games resulted in six goals being scored. (.00000456)