For a certain river, suppose the drought length Y is the number of consecutive time intervals in which the water supply remains below a critical value y0 (a deficit), preceded by and followed by periods in which the supply exceeds this critical value (a surplus). An article proposes a geometric distribution with p = 0.373 for this random variable. (Round your answers to three decimal places.) (a) What is the probability that a drought lasts exactly 3 intervals? At most 3 intervals? exactly 3 intervals at most 3 intervals (b) What is the probability that the length of a drought exceeds its mean value by at least one standard deviation?
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!
For a certain river, suppose the drought length Y is the number of consecutive time intervals in which the water supply remains below a critical value y0 (a deficit), preceded by and followed by periods in which the supply exceeds this critical value (a surplus). An article proposes a geometric distribution with p = 0.373 for this random variable. (Round your answers to three decimal places.)
| exactly 3 intervals | |
| at most 3 intervals |
(b) What is the probability that the length of a drought exceeds its
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