GCSE Mathematics Revision
Probability – GCSE Maths Syllabus Content
The notes below will be helpful for you to understand and remember what probability is and how it works. This is an important subject on your Maths GCSE syllabus and you must understand the key facts about what probability is and how to work out the probability of an event. Below, are some of the key things you need to remember, so take a look and then listen to our song, watch the video and take the test, to see how much you have remembered!
Probability is a way to measure the chance that something will occur from an experiment, survey or event.
One way to measure the likelihood is to say that an outcome will be:
Likely, Impossible or Certain.
In numbers we could say - an impossible event has a probability of zero and the event which is certain could have the probability of one.
If you were tossing a coin and recording how many times in a 100 you got a ‘head’, you could measure that by using probability.
You could say that you have a 50 in a 100 chance before you even start the experiment, this is called ‘theoretical probability’.
Mutually exclusive events are things like; a dancer in a competition can’t win, lose and draw, she can only have one outcome.
We can look at an example using numbers. Say you had a bag of sweets and you had 5 red, 5 blue and 5 cola. What is the probability you will pick a cola sweet? This would be 5/15. A five in fifteen chance.
We can also use tables as a visual way of working out probability. Say we were rolling two dice, we can record the outcomes for both in a table and see how many possible outcomes we get. We can see how many rolls it takes for both dice to roll a 6 at the same time.
Now that you know some of the facts, why not listen to Probability 2 which can be found here. This will give you more of the information you need to know!
Responsive, lightweight, fast, synchronized with CSS animations, fully customizable modal window plugin with declarative configuration and hash tracking.