Olympiad Maths Prep

Track / Stage 3 / 4 of 260 #4 of 2000

Problem 4

AMC 10/12, early questions
Combinatorics Difficulty 3.0 Find the answer

There are 6 identical cards, with the numbers "19211921", "19941994", "19351935", "19491949", "19781978", and "19801980" written on them. These cards are placed with their backs facing up, shuffled, and one card is randomly drawn. The probability of drawing a card with an even number on it is ____.

Official solution

To solve the problem of finding the probability of drawing a card with an even number from the given set of cards, we proceed as follows:

Step 1: Identify the total number of cards. Since there are 6 cards in total, we denote this as Ntotal=6N_{\text{total}} = 6.

Step 2: Determine the number of cards that have an even number. By examining the numbers "19211921", "19941994", "19351935", "19491949", "19781978", and "19801980", we find that there are 3 even numbers among them. Thus, we denote this as Neven=3N_{\text{even}} = 3.

Step 3: Calculate the probability of drawing an even number. The probability P(even)P(\text{even}) is the ratio of the number of even cards to the total number of cards, which can be expressed as:
P(even)=NevenNtotal=36P(\text{even}) = \frac{N_{\text{even}}}{N_{\text{total}}} = \frac{3}{6}

Step 4: Simplify the fraction to find the final probability. The fraction 36\frac{3}{6} simplifies to 12\frac{1}{2}, which gives us:
P(even)=12P(\text{even}) = \frac{1}{2}

Therefore, the probability of drawing a card with an even number on it is 12\boxed{\frac{1}{2}}.

Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic, difficulty and ordering added by this site.