If you flip a coin three times, what is the probability of getting tails three times?

Question

If you flip a coin three times, what is the probability of getting tails three times?

1 Answer

Impact of this question

62864 views around the world

You can reuse this answer
Creative Commons License

Answer 1 · 2015-10-27T19:27:14

$1/8$

Explanation:

To calculate the probability you have to name all possible results first. If you mark a result of a single coin flip as $H$ for heads or $T$ for tails all results of $3$ flips can be written as:

$Omega={(H,H,H),(H,H,T),(H,T,H),(H,T,T),(T,H,H),(T,H,T),(T,T,H),(T,T,T)}$

Each triplet contains results on $1$ st, $2$ nd and $3$ rd coin. So you can see that in total there are $8$ elementary events in $Omega$ .

$|Omega|=8$

Now we have to define event $A$ of getting tails three times.

The only elementary event which satisfies this condition is $(T,T,T)$ so we can write that:

$A={(T,T,T)}$
$|A|=1$

Now according to the (classic) definition of probability we can write, that:

$P(A)=|A|/|Omega|=1/8$

So finally we can write the answer:

Probability of getting 3 tails in 3 coin flips is $1/8$ .

Science

Math

Humanities

... and beyond

If you flip a coin three times, what is the probability of getting tails three times?

1 Answer

Explanation:

Related questions

Impact of this question