standard_description: Recognize and explain the concepts of conditional probability and independence in everyday language and everyday situations. For example, compare the chance of having lung cancer if you are a smoker with the chance of being a smoker if you have lung cancer.
problem_activity: Warm-up
The mathematical purpose of this activity is to explore, formally define, and introduce notation for the concept of
conditional probability.
Launch
Display the image of a deck of cards.
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Explain that there are four suits (spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs) with 13 cards in each suit (ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, king) for a total of 52 cards. Hearts and diamonds are always considered red cards while clubs and spades are always considered black cards. Face cards are jack, queen, or king.
Unless otherwise noted, a standard deck of cards in these materials will consist of these 52 cards.
Representation: Internalize Comprehension.
Use virtual or concrete manipulatives to connect symbols to concrete objects or values. Provide students with a standard deck of cards to see the different suits and the cards that are red and black. Allow groups of students to manipulate the cards to illustrate the probabilities in the problems.
Supports accessibility for: Visual-spatial processing; Conceptual processing
Student Facing
Noah will select 1 card at random from a standard deck of cards. Find the probabilities. Explain or show your reasoning.
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\(P(\text{the card is a queen})\)
\(P(\text{the card is a heart})\)
\(P(\text{the card is a queen and heart})\)
Elena pulls out only the hearts from the deck and sets the rest of the cards aside. She shuffles the hearts and draws one card. What is the probability she gets a queen?
Student Response
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Activity Synthesis
The purpose of this discussion is to formally define conditional probability and to introduce notation for conditional probability. Tell students that “
conditional probability
is defined as the probability of an event happening under the condition that another event occurs.” Use Elena’s situation as an example to show the notation for conditional probability:
\(P(\text{the card is a queen | the card is a heart})\)
which can be read as “the probability that the card is a queen under the condition that the card is a heart has occurred.” In this situation, Elena made sure the card would be a heart by removing the other suits and drawing only from those cards.
Display
\(P(\text{the card is a heart | the card is a queen})\)
for all to see and ask students to explain what it means, then ask students to find the probability. (It means the probability that the card is a heart under the condition that it is a queen. It has the value of
\(\frac{1}{4}\)
since there is one heart card among the 4 queens.) This is the notation we will use throughout this unit to represent conditional probability. Ask students “How would you write what is the probability that a card is an 8 under the condition that is a spade?” (
\(P(\text{the card is an 8| the card is a spade})\)
).


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