Still, despite his fervent prayers, his wish goes unanswered. Nevertheless, he repeats his request, year after year, with no success. According to lottery officials each ticket has a one in ten chance of winning a prize. The lottery is like drawing from a box with 1 ticket marked 1 and 9 marked 0. We would then expect to win 25.6 times.
Any difference is due to chance.
We have observed 36 wins, the chance that we win this many times can be computed using the normal approximation. To include the box around 36 we use the continuity correction factor and convert 35.5 into standard units. More than 1 million US high school students took the SAT in 1995 and 1996. In 1995, the average verbal score was 428 and the SD was 110. The histogram followed the Normal curve quite closely.