Q.Three coins are tossed. Describe
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →The key idea is to use the sample space of 8 outcomes from tossing three coins and apply set operations to construct events that satisfy the given conditions. The final answers are specific subsets of the sample space.
When three coins are tossed, each coin can land either heads (H) or tails (T). The total number of possible outcomes is . The sample space is:
An event is any subset of . Two events are mutually exclusive if they have no outcome in common — their intersection is empty. Events are exhaustive if their union equals the entire sample space . If they are not exhaustive, their union is a proper subset of .
Let’s construct each required set step by step.
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Two events which are mutually exclusive
Pick any two events that cannot happen together. For instance, let
and
.
Since , they are mutually exclusive. They are not exhaustive because many outcomes (like HHT) are in neither.
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Three events which are mutually exclusive and exhaustive
We need three disjoint events whose union is . A natural way is to group outcomes by the number of heads:
- But that gives four events. To have exactly three, combine two of them. For example, let:
- Check: , , , and . So these three are mutually exclusive and exhaustive.
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Two events which are not mutually exclusive
They must share at least one outcome. Let
and
.
Their intersection is non-empty, so they are not mutually exclusive.
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Two events which are mutually exclusive but not exhaustive
They must be disjoint, but their union should miss at least one outcome. Take
and
.
, so mutually exclusive. Their union does not include outcomes like HHH or HTT, so not exhaustive.
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Three events which are mutually exclusive but not exhaustive
We need three pairwise disjoint events whose union is a proper subset of . For instance:
- …
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