Original practice · fully worked
Original variant: cover every token color
A locker contains 5 red, 4 blue, and 3 green tokens. Five tokens are drawn uniformly without replacement. Calculate the probability that the sample contains at least one token of every color.
- A
0.001 - B
0.255 - C
0.581 - D
0.745 - E
0.974
Answer and calculation
There are C(12,5)=792 samples. Inclusion-exclusion removes 21, 56, and 126 samples missing each color and restores one all-red sample counted twice, leaving 590; thus 590/792=0.74495, choice D.
Setup
Setup
Count unordered five-token samples because all such subsets are equally likely.
Nall=(512)=792 Model
Model
Use inclusion-exclusion on samples missing red, blue, or green. Only the all-red sample survives a pairwise intersection.
Nmiss R=(57)=21 Nmiss B=(58)=56 Nmiss G=(59)=126 Nmiss B and G=(55)=1 Compute
Compute
Subtract the three missing-color counts and add back the one nonempty intersection.
Nfav=792−21−56−126+1=590 Pr(every color)=792590=396295=0.744949495 Answer
Answer
The probability of covering all three colors is approximately 0.745.
0.745(D)