Question

An experiment consists of recording boy-girl composition of families with 2 children.

(i) What is the sample space if we are interested in knowing whether it is a boy or girl in the order of their births?

(ii) What is the sample space if we are interested in the number of girls in the family?

Answer 1

(i) When the order of the birth of a girl or a boy is considered, the sample space is given by S = {GG, GB, BG, BB}

(ii) Since the maximum number of children in each family is 2, a family can either have 2 girls or 1 girl or no girl. Hence, the required sample space is S = {0, 1, 2}