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Miscellaneous Exercise · Q5

Q.If a leap year is selected at random, what is the chance that it will contain 53 tuesdays?

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The key idea is that a leap year has 366 days = 52 weeks + 2 extra days. The chance of 53 Tuesdays equals the probability that one of those two extra days is a Tuesday. Since the two extra days are equally likely to be any consecutive pair of weekdays, the required probability is 27\frac{2}{7}.

Why conditional probability?

This problem is a classic application of equally likely outcomes — not conditional probability in the strict sense, but the reasoning is similar: we are counting favourable arrangements among all possible arrangements of the extra days. A leap year has 366 days, which is exactly 52 weeks (giving 52 Tuesdays) plus 2 extra days. For the year to have 53 Tuesdays, at least one of those two extra days must be a Tuesday.

Step-by-step reasoning

  1. Structure of a leap year

    A leap year has 366 days.

    366=52×7+2366 = 52 \times 7 + 2

    So there are 52 complete weeks (each containing one Tuesday) and 2 additional days.

  2. What are the possible extra days?

    The two extra days are consecutive. If the year starts on a particular weekday, the extra days are the first two days of the year. But since the year is selected at random, the starting day is equally likely to be any of the 7 weekdays.

    Therefore, the pair of extra days can be any of the 7 possible consecutive pairs:

    (Monday, Tuesday), (Tuesday, Wednesday), (Wednesday, Thursday), (Thursday, Friday), (Friday, Saturday), (Saturday, Sunday), (Sunday, Monday).

  3. Counting favourable outcomes

    We need the year to have 53 Tuesdays. That happens if either of the two extra days is a Tuesday.

    • In the pair (Monday, Tuesday): Tuesday appears once → favourable.
    • In the pair (Tuesday, Wednesday): Tuesday appears once → favourable.
    • In the other five pairs, Tuesday does not appear at all. So exactly 2 out of the 7 possible pairs contain a Tuesday.
  4. Probability calculation …

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