Let and be random variables describing independent tosses of a fair coin. Let be the random variable that equals if both and land heads and that equals 0 otherwise.
How many of the following statements are true?
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Consider the events X = tails and Z = 1 . Then, P ( X = tails ∩ Z = 1 ) = 0 , since Z cannot be 1 if X is tails. On the other hand, P ( X = tails ) = 1 / 2 and P ( Z = 1 ) = 1 / 4 . A simple computation shows that P ( X = tails ∩ Z = 1 ) = 0 = P ( X = tails ) ⋅ P ( Z = 1 ) , so these two events are not independent. It follows then that X and Z are not independent, and a similar argument shows that Y and Z are not independent either. Thus, the last three statements are all false.
On the other hand, it is given in the problem statement that X and Y are independent, so the first statement is true. The answer then, is 1.