Quandaries
and Queries
20% of a certain population smoke. For smokers the probability of dieing of lung cancer is ten times what it is for non-smokers. Over all the probability of dying of lung cancer is .006. Find the probability for smokers and nonsmokers.
Hi Sean,
Why not try to understand the problem by pretending the population is 10000 and seeing how many of your population land in each category -- for example, 2000 are smokers and 60 of the of the 10000 die of lung cancer. Let x be the fraction of the 8000 nonsmokers who die of lung cancer.
Chris