Ann, did you go to the Hunger Games movie? I did, Bria, and I have read the book too. Why do you ask?

Well, there was one very confusing part, mostly because I did not read the book I think. What part was it, Bria? The part they pulled out Primrose’s name for the Reaping.

Why was Primrose’s name getting chosen a surprise? Ann, I did not understand why it was such a surprise that Primrose was chosen. Every girls’ name who was 12-18 had a slip in the bowl. Well, Bria it was a surprise for Primrose to get chosen because the probability of her name getting picked was very low. Ann, how do you know that?

To start off, everyone’s name was not in the bowl an equal number of times. Primrose’s name was in the bowl once because she was 12. Katniss’ name was in the bowl 20 times due to her age and because their family needed more food or supplies throughout the year. Many others had their name in the bowl multiple times for these reasons.

Okay so not everyone’s name was in there the same number of times, what does that have to do with probability? Well the probability of an event, like pulling a name from the reaping bowl, is figured out like this… Simple probability is figured by finding the number of ways an event can occur divided by the number of possible outcomes.

So how do we figure out the probability of Primrose getting her name chosen from the Reaping bowl? We don’t know for sure how many slips of names were really in the Reaping Bowl but we can estimate about 300 names. In that case, Primrose had her name in the bowl once which would be the number of ways the event could occur and there were 300 total outcomes. This means the probability of Primrose’s name getting chosen is 1/300. Number of slips with Primrose’s name = Estimated number of total slips with names

= ÷20 ÷20 Let me try the probability of Katniss’ name getting chosen. Number of slips with Katniss’ name = ÷20 Estimated number of total slips with names Katniss had her name in the Reaping bowl 20 times and we estimated the total number of names in the Reaping bowl was 300. So that make 20/300. But wait, I know we can simplify this fraction. Let’s see, divide both numerator and denominator by 20 and we have the fraction 1/15.

And if we divide the fraction and write it as a decimal we can compare the probabilities in another way. = So if we round to the nearest thousandth that would mean that Primrose’s probability of getting picked was 3 thousandths and Katniss’ probability of getting picked was 67 thousandths. =