MHB Chances of Student Getting Hot Chocolate at Dan's Office Hours

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The discussion revolves around calculating the probability of a student who attended Dan's office hours getting hot chocolate at a coffee shop. It is established that 20% of the people in the shop during office hours are students, with 30% of those students attending for office hours. Out of the students, 20% received hot chocolate, while 50% got nothing. In the larger group of non-students, 10% also got hot chocolate. The final probability that a person who got hot chocolate was a student attending office hours is calculated to be 1/3.
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30% of the students who came into a coffee shop talk to Dan's for his office hours. 20% of them got hot chocolate. 50% of them got nothing. Only 20% of the people in the shop during those two hours were students coming for Dan's office hours. Out of this larger group, 65% got coffee, 10% got hot chocolate, and 25% got nothing. What are the chances that someone in the shop during those two hours was a student who came in for office hours given that they got hot chocolate?
 
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This is seriously confusing! When you say "Out of this larger group" what "larger group" do you mean? Since you had just said " Only 20% of the people in the shop during those two hours were students coming for Dan's office hours." I presume that the "larger group" are those that are not "students coming for Dan's office hours". But you had already said "30% of the students who came into a coffee shop talk to Dan's for his office hours". So "students" are different from the general people who come to the coffee shop?

Imagine 1000 people in the coffee shop. 20% of them, 200, are "students coming for Dan's office hours" and the other 80%, 800, are not.

Of the 200 'students coming for Dan's office hours", 20%, 0.2(200)= 40 students, got hot chocolate, 50%, 0.5(200)= 100 students, got nothing, and I presume that the remaining 60 students got coffee.

Of the 800 people what are NOT "students coming from Dan's office hours", 65%, 0.65(800)= 520 people, got coffee, 10%, 0.10(800)= 80 people, got hot chocolate, and 25%, 0.25(800)= 200 people, got nothing. (That adds to 800 people so our assumption that "coffee", "hot chocolate", or "nothing" are the only options is valid.)

"What are the chances that someone in the shop during those two hours was a student who came in for office hours given that they got hot chocolate?"

From above, a total of 40+ 80= 120 people got hot chocolate. 40 of those were "a student who came in for officice hours" so the probability that "someone in the shop during those two hours was a student who came in for office hours given that they got hot chocolate" is 40/120= 1/3.
 
Hi,

Yeah the wording is confusing unfortunately, I didn't make up this problem. Yes, the larger group is assumed to be non-students (general public). This problem involves Bayes Theorem but I am having trouble with plugging in the numbers
 
I have been insisting to my statistics students that for probabilities, the rule is the number of significant figures is the number of digits past the leading zeros or leading nines. For example to give 4 significant figures for a probability: 0.000001234 and 0.99999991234 are the correct number of decimal places. That way the complementary probability can also be given to the same significant figures ( 0.999998766 and 0.00000008766 respectively). More generally if you have a value that...

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