0.o

[glass_icarus]

Dear circle, a question!

Poll #8325

This poll is closed.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 47

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If you saw a problem that said "What is the probability that of three children, all are girls or boys?", would you interpret as:

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all = "girls or boys"
10 (21.3%)

"all girls OR all boys"
37 (78.7%)

(also, yes, gender-binary, I know.)

Comments

*is massive pedant*

[rydra_wong]

I would guess that (in a general academic context) the problem-setter meant the latter, but would be grumpy about this because what they said was the former.

Then I would get distracted by trying to calculate the answer to the former based on estimates of the percentage of intersex and genderqueer people in the population, before giving up in disgruntlement at the lack of good statistics (not to mention the inevitable fuzziness of categories, many intersex people being binary-gendered, etc. etc.).

Finally, if the problem-setter did indeed mean the latter, I would hope very much that they were not in charge of teaching formal logic.

[boundbooks]

I would assume that the writer intended the second, but the first is the technically correct interpretation. :)

[surpassingly]

So badly phrased! But yeah, what boundbooks said, simply because the first option is too "easy" and probability questions almost never seek a 1 or 0 answer.

[whymzycal]

I'd assume the second (depending on the context of the question being asked) because that would be the default interpretation for most disciplines, but the first one would, as boundbooks says, be the technically correct interpretation.