Business Statistics: For Contemporary Decision Making, 8th Edition

CHAPTER 5

Discrete Distributions

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

The overall learning objective of Chapter 5 is to help you understand a category of probability distributions that produces only discrete outcomes, thereby enabling you to:

1. Define a random variable in order to differentiate between a discrete distribution and a continuous distribution.

2. Determine the mean, variance, and standard deviation of a discrete distribution.

3. Solve problems involving the binomial distribution using the binomial formula and the binomial table.

4. Solve problems involving the Poisson distribution using the Poisson formula and the Poisson table.

5. Solve problems involving the hypergeometric distribution using the hypergeometric formula.

Life with a Cell Phone

As early as 1947, scientists understood the basic concept of a cell phone as a type of two-way radio. Seeing the potential of crude mobile car phones, researchers understood that by using a small range of service areas (cells) with frequency reuse, they could increase the capacity for mobile phone usage significantly even though the technology was not then available. During that same year, AT&T proposed the allocation of a large number of radio-spectrum frequencies by the FCC that would thereby make widespread mobile phone service feasible. At ...