At the start of a week, a coal mine has a high-capacity storage bin that is half full. During the week, 20 loads of coal are added to the storage bin. Each load of coal has a volume that is normally distributed with mean 1.50 cubic yards and standard deviation 0.25 cubic yards. During the same week, coal is removed from the storage bin and loaded into 4 railroad cars. The amount of coal loaded into each railroad car is normally distributed with mean 7.25 cubic yards and standard deviation 0.50 cubic yards. The amounts added to the storage bin or removed from the storage bin are mutually independent. Calculate the probability that the storage bin contains more coal at the end of the week than it had at the beginning of the week.
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
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