find experimental prob. of getting heads when tossing coin

[frankie10]

Sarwar has a lot of time on his hands,so he starts to toss a coin and count the number of times it comes up heads.He finds that out of 1000 tosses,he gets heads 487 times and tails 513 times.

what would the experimental probability of getting heads when tossing the coin.

[stapel_eliz]

What were the total number of tosses?

How many of these were "successes"?

What then what the percent that were "successes"?

What then is the probability of a "success" on any one toss?

[sdbielz]

Experimental probability is different from probability. Probability is what you could expect to happen, and experimental probability is what you observe during an experiment. Because a coin has 2 sides, the probability of it being heads is 1/2. This is because there is only 1 'heads' on the coin, but there are two sides to the coin.

The experimental probability in this case would be the number of favorable outcomes divided by the number of total outcomes. Heads occured 487 times, and there were 1000 total outcomes. Thus, the experimental probability in this case is 487/1000. this can allso be written as .487