EAs4y2Siksha.com
Step 6: Moral of the Story
Probability is not just about numbers. It’s about visualizing possibilities, understanding
overlaps, and thinking logically. Each throw of a die, each event in a sample space, is like a
tiny story with its own chance of happening.
By imagining outcomes as grids, diagrams, and overlapping circles, you not only get the
correct answer but also understand why it works. And that’s the secret to enjoying and
mastering probability.
8.(a) Explain Poisson distribution and its important properties.
(b) What is Normal distribution? Give its important properties.
Ans: Understanding Poisson and Normal Distributions: A Story of Randomness and
Patterns
Imagine you are sitting at a bus stop on a quiet morning. You notice that buses arrive at
random times. Some days, two buses come within 10 minutes, while other days, there
might be none for half an hour. You start thinking: “Is there any way to understand these
random events? Can we somehow predict the likelihood of buses arriving in a given time?”
This is exactly the world of probability distributions, which are tools statisticians use to
make sense of random events. Among the many distributions, two stand out in practical
applications: Poisson distribution and Normal distribution. Let’s explore them, step by step,
in a way that makes them both simple and relatable.
(a) Poisson Distribution
Imagine a small town where accidents at a particular road intersection are rare but
occasionally happen. One day, you are asked to calculate the probability of exactly 0, 1, 2, or
3 accidents happening in a day.
Here comes the Poisson distribution to the rescue. Named after the French mathematician
Simeon Denis Poisson, this distribution helps us describe the probability of a given number
of events happening in a fixed interval of time or space, when these events occur
independently, and the average rate is known.
Definition of Poisson Distribution
If the average number of events in a time interval is λ (lambda), the probability of observing
exactly x events is given by the formula: