Question

A town has two hospitals: one large and one small. Assuming there is an equal number of boys and girls born every year in the united states, which hospital is more likely to have close to 50 percent girls and 50 percent boys born on any given day? (the larger, the smaller, about the same)

Answer 1

Assuming that boys and girls are equally likely, the answer is 3: Either is equally likely.

Actually, slightly more boys are born than girls, so the completely correct answer is that the order with more boys is slightly more likely. If you know Marcus and Catti, you will know that in this case, number 2 is correct, and that they just had their fifth lucky boy.

But most people, says the mathemagician, pick answer number 1, and for an interesting reason. People base their answers on heuristics, rules of thumb. (Heuristics are "rules" that aren't guaranteed to work, but much of our thinking is based on them. They become our heuristics because they have worked, or we believe they have worked, for us in the past.)

In this case, the heuristic which gives the wrong answer is known as the Representativeness Heuristic. In other words, we think that things that are random should LOOK random.

A better-known heuristic is the Vividness Heuristic, in which vivid events are judged more probable than they really are. So most people perceive that there is more chance of dying in an airplane crash than in a car accident, even though dying in a car accident is far, far more likely

Answer 2

Concept:

The area of mathematics known as probability deals with numerical representations of the likelihood that an event will occur or that a statement is true. An event's probability is a number between $0$ and $1,$where, broadly speaking, $0$ denotes the event's impossibility and $1$ denotes certainty. The probability serves as a gauge for how likely an event is to occur. It gauges how likely an occurrence is.

Given:

Here it is given that a town has two hospitals: one large and one small and assuming there is an equal number of boys and girls born every year in the united states.

Find:

We have to find which hospital is more likely to have close to $50$ percent girls and $50$ percent boys born on any given day.

Solution:

According to the question, one large and one small and assuming there is an equal number of boys and girls born every year in the united states.

Here by calculating the sampling variability we can say that The large Hospital likely to have close to $50$ percent girls and $50$ percent boys born on any given day.

Hence, the correct answer of the question is The larger hospital.

#SPJ2