Probability of a 7

A random card falls out of a standard deck of 52 cards. If you select a card from the remaining 51 cards randomly, what is the probability that it is a "7"?

Note: There are four "7"s in a standard deck.

3 52 \frac{3}{52} 3 51 \frac{3}{51} 4 52 \frac{4}{52} 4 51 \frac{4}{51}

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1 solution

Zandra Vinegar Staff
Oct 14, 2015

Basically, it doesn't matter that one of the cards is randomly on the floor when you draw yours. Even if 51 52 \frac{51}{52} of the cards randomly fell to the floor, your chance of drawing/taking that last card and having it be a 7 would still be 4 52 \frac{4}{52} -- 4 7's out of 52 cards.

If you're still not convinced, work it out with conditional probability. Since the card that falls out of the deck is random, there's a 4 52 \frac{4}{52} chance that the card that falls loose is a 7. If it was a 7, then you now have only a 3 51 \frac{3}{51} chance of drawing a 7 -- so there's a 3 × 4 51 × 52 \frac{3 \times 4}{51 \times 52} chance that you draw a 7 this way. But 48 52 \frac{48}{52} of the time, it wasn't a 7 that fell out, and that means you now have a 4 51 \frac{4}{51} chance of drawing a 7 -- so there's a 48 × 4 52 × 51 \frac{48 \times 4}{52 \times 51} chance that you draw a 7 this way.

3 × 4 52 × 51 + 48 × 4 52 × 51 = ( 3 + 48 ) × 4 52 × 51 = 51 × 4 52 × 51 = 4 52 \frac{3 \times 4}{52 \times 51} + \frac{48 \times 4}{52 \times 51} = \frac{(3+48) \times 4}{52 \times 51}= \frac{51 \times 4}{52 \times 51} = \frac{4}{52}

Actually would it not be, considering that the chances of one of the 7s falling out is 1/13, then the chances that all 4 still remain in the deck of now 51 is 12/13, so the new probability would be: 12/13 X 4/51 = 16/221

Is this not the case?

Darian Scott - 5 years, 8 months ago

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Not quite. You also have to consider the case in which no 7s have fallen out of the deck. In other words, there are two events: probability that one draws a 7 given that a 7 has fallen out (the case you considered), and probability that one draws a 7 given that no 7s have fallen out. The sum of the probabilities of these two events is the probability that one draws out a seven, which was already explained by Zandra.

Daniel Fadul - 5 years, 8 months ago

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