Do the Math!

Image result for £1 + coin images

Daniel Finkelstein writing in The Times pokes some gentle fun at the calibre of some Westminster MPs and he's right you know because some of them really are as thick as mince.

Now I happen to know the answer to Daniel's question because the probability of any single coin tops producing a 'head' is one in two, or 50% or 0.5.

So the odds of producing two 'heads' in a row is 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25 or 25% or 1 in 4.

A heads-up on why MPs are probably innumerate

By Daniel Finkelstein - The Times


Notebook

The most difficult questions you can be posed as a politician are factual ones. I was once, on live television, asked the price of a pound of potatoes and was forced lamely, if truthfully, to say that I generally didn’t eat potatoes.

So I feel a bit diffident about suggesting this, but I really think you ought to ask your local candidate a factual question: if you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?

I was shocked to discover this week what happened when the Royal Statistical Society put this simple problem to 97 members of the last parliament.

Three quarters of the MPs were confident they knew. Yet, shockingly, only 40 per cent got it right. Just slightly over half of Tory MPs gave the correct answer but fewer than a quarter of Labour MPs.

How can people make difficult judgments about public sector pensions, which involve compound interest and actuarial calculations, or make a judgment about foreign policy intervention, which involves considering probabilities, if they don’t know that there is a 25 per cent chance of getting two heads when you spin a coin twice? No wonder we’ve got a huge budget deficit when so many MPs can’t do simple maths. It’s like not being able to read. On May 7, it would be nice to think that it is not only your vote that counts, but also your MP.

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