OCR S2 2008 January — Question 6

Exam BoardOCR
ModuleS2 (Statistics 2)
Year2008
SessionJanuary
TopicApproximating the Poisson to the Normal distribution
TypeCombined Poisson approximation and exact calculation

6 The number of house sales per week handled by an estate agent is modelled by the distribution \(\operatorname { Po } ( 3 )\).
  1. Find the probability that, in one randomly chosen week, the number of sales handled is
    (a) greater than 4 ,
    (b) exactly 4 .
  2. Use a suitable approximation to the Poisson distribution to find the probability that, in a year consisting of 50 working weeks, the estate agent handles more than 165 house sales.
  3. One of the conditions needed for the use of a Poisson model to be valid is that house sales are independent of one another.
    (a) Explain, in non-technical language, what you understand by this condition.
    (b) State another condition that is needed.