Colour of the first ball given a blue second
Question
An urn holds balls: are green and are blue. Two balls are taken out one after the other, without putting the first back. You are told only that the second ball drawn is blue. Given this, what is the probability that the first ball drawn was green?
Short answer
. Draws without replacement are exchangeable, so conditioning on the second ball being blue is the same as conditioning on the first being blue. That leaves green among balls, giving .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
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