A town recently dismissed 10 employees in order to meet their new budget reductions. The town had 7 employees over 50 years of age and 18 under 50. If the dismissed employees were selected at random, what is the probability that exactly 5 employees were over 50

0.055 = 5.5% probability that exactly 5 employees were over 50.

Step-by-step explanation:

The employees are dismissed from the sample without replacement, which means that the hypergeometric distribution is used to solve this question.

Hypergeometric distribution:

The probability of x successes is given by the following formula:

In which:

x is the number of successes.

N is the size of the population.

n is the size of the sample.

k is the total number of desired outcomes.

Combinations formula:

is the number of different combinations of x objects from a set of n elements, given by the following formula.

In this question:

Total of 7 + 18 = 25 employees, which means that

7 over 50, which means that

10 were dismissed, which means that

What is the probability that exactly 5 employees were over 50?

This is P(X = 5). So

0.055 = 5.5% probability that exactly 5 employees were over 50.