Mathematics

Aileen Ball

7 January, 05:22

Your family bought the giant economy-size pack of 2,000 randomly mixed, assorted juice boxes. Every day your mother randomly puts one in your lunch box. There are four flavors: apple, orange, grape and mixed-fruit. Your favorite is grape, but you don't get any grape in your lunch box the first week. After two months (40 school days), you've gotten 9 grape juice boxes. This is close to what you'd expect theoretically (10 boxes). Why is the two-month total closer to theoretical than the one-week number?

A) The 2,000-box pack probably wasn't randomly assorted.

B) Someone probably told your mother that you like grape the best.

C) Everybody likes grape the best; the company probably put less grape in the pack than other flavors.

D) Two months gives a sample size of 40 juice boxes, which is larger and more statistically significant than the 5-box sample from the first week.