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Orange ball after moving 300 balls between urns

Question

Urn XX holds 400400 orange and 100100 yellow balls, and urn YY holds 100100 orange and 400400 yellow balls. A random set of 300300 balls is taken from urn XX and added to urn YY. A single ball is then chosen uniformly at random from the 800800 balls now in urn YY. What is the probability it is orange?

Short answer

1740\tfrac{17}{40}. The transferred balls are on average 80%80\% orange, so urn YY expects 240+100=340240+100=340 orange balls out of 800800. By the law of total probability the chance of orange is 38⋅45+58⋅15=1740\tfrac38\cdot\tfrac45+\tfrac58\cdot\tfrac15=\tfrac{17}{40}.

Adapted from QuantQuestions.io; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.

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