Week 1 discussion questions - Coursework Example

Education Education Question The Fundamental Counting Principle is a counting technique used to find out the number ofpossible outcomes without actually counting and listing all the possible events of any trial. The fundamental counting principle helps us to identify the number of choices we are available with when choosing randomly (Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications, 1997). There are various methods through which this principle can be clearly illustrated; one such method is the tree diagram.

It is so called because of its appearance of a tree. We first write all the events and then against each event we write all the possible outcomes. By counting the number of branches we can obtain all the possible outcomes of any event. It may be drawn horizontally or vertically. Question 2Mean is usually referred to as the average of a number of values. It is obtained by taking the sum of all the given values and then dividing by the total number of entries. It is quite simple to find the mean of the values.

However the students may face a problem if there is a zero in the given data; adding a zero will not affect the value of sum but if zero is not counted as an entry huge errors may arise in the mean value. The students may also experience difficulties in accepting the result of the mean of the given numbers because the mean that is obtained may sometimes be a number from the given data and sometimes may vary from the given values; this variation can sometimes be large and sometimes be small. At this point the students face difficulty in accepting the answer.

For example, , ReferencesConsortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (U.S.). (1997). For all practical purposes: Introduction to contemporary mathematics. New York: W.H. Freeman.