An Undergraduate Study Committee of 6 members at a major university is to be formed from a pool of faculty of 18 men and 6 women. Which of the following distributions would you use to figure out the probability that half of the members will be women?
A) Poisson distribution
B) uniform distribution
C) exponential distribution
D) hypergeometric distribution

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The hypergeometric distribution is the appropriate distribution to use when sampling without replacement from a finite population. In this case, we are selecting a committee of 6 members from a pool of 18 men and 6 women, without replacement. The question asks for the probability of selecting exactly 3 women (half of the committee), which is a specific value that can be calculated using the hypergeometric distribution. The Poisson, uniform, and exponential distributions would not be appropriate for this scenario.

An Undergraduate Study Committee of 6 Members at a Major