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JEE Advanced 2020 Paper 2 · Mathematics · Probability · medium

A fair die is rolled once. If it shows 1 or 2, two balls are drawn without replacement from urn U1 containing 2 white and 3 black balls; otherwise…

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A fair die is rolled once. If it shows 1 or 2, two balls are drawn without replacement from urn U1U_1 containing 2 white and 3 black balls; otherwise two balls are drawn without replacement from urn U2U_2 containing 3 white and 2 black balls. Given that both balls drawn are white, let pp be the probability that urn U1U_1 was used. Find 1/p1/p.
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Answer: 7

Use Bayes' theorem. The prior for U1U_1 is 2/6=1/32/6=1/3 and for U2U_2 is 2/32/3. The chance of two white balls from U1U_1 is (22)/(52)=1/10\binom22/\binom52=1/10, and from U2U_2 it is (32)/(52)=3/10\binom32/\binom52=3/10. The joint probabilities are 13⋅110=130\tfrac13\cdot\tfrac1{10}=\tfrac1{30} and 23⋅310=15=630\tfrac23\cdot\tfrac3{10}=\tfrac15=\tfrac6{30}. Therefore p=1/301/30+6/30=17p=\dfrac{1/30}{1/30+6/30}=\dfrac17, and 1/p=71/p=7. A common slip is to forget that the urn is chosen with unequal prior probabilities, which would give p=1/4p=1/4 and the wrong answer 44. The sanity check is that the posterior must be smaller than the prior of one third, because the white-rich urn U2 is far more likely to give two white balls; the value one seventh satisfies this.
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