If a piece of toast falls off your breakfast plate, is it more likely to land with the buttered side down? According to Murphy’s Law (the assumption that if anything can go wrong, it will), the answer is “Yes.” Most scientists would argue that by the law of probability, the toast is equally likely to land butter-side up or butter-side down. Robert Matthews, science correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, disagrees. He claims that when toast falls off a plate that is being carried at a “typical height,” the toast has just enough time to rotate once (landing butter-side down) before it lands. To test his claim, Mr. Matthews has arranged for 150,000 students in Great Britain to carry out the experiment with tumbling toast.

Question

If a piece of toast falls off your breakfast plate, is it more likely to land with the buttered side down? According to Murphy’s Law (the assumption that if anything can go wrong, it will), the answer is “Yes.” Most scientists would argue that by the law of probability, the toast is equally likely to land butter-side up or butter-side down. Robert Matthews, science correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, disagrees. He claims that when toast falls off a plate that is being carried at a “typical height,” the toast has just enough time to rotate once (landing butter-side down) before it lands. To test his claim, Mr. Matthews has arranged for 150,000 students in Great Britain to carry out the experiment with tumbling toast.
Assuming scientists are correct, the proportion of times that the toast will land butter-side down is p = 0.5. We can use a coin toss to simulate the experiment. Let heads represent the toast landing butter-side up.

a)  Toss a coin 5 times and record the proportion of heads obtained,  (number of heads)/5. Explain how your result relates to the tumbling-toast experiment.

b)  Repeat this sampling process 5 times. Make a dotplot of the 5 values of . Is the center of your distribution close to 0.5?

PsyDAG · Answer

We cannot toss the coins for you nor make a plot.