Can you name the correct order of the events on the right, from least likely to most likely? by Davidmon5

Can you name the correct order of the events on the right, from least likely to most likely?

created by Davidmon5

Enter a letter in the box below
Correctly named letters will show up below
Click any empty Probability or Letter to answer for that location
Enter only the letter of the event on the right to match the event to its probability.
This quiz has not been verified by Sporcle

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05:00

Show Missed Answers

Probability	Letter	Answer Choices: What're the Odds That/Of
1:195,249,054		A - being struck by lightning in a given year, based on reported injuries and deaths (US)
1:10,179,260		B - being struck by lightning in your lifetime
1:9,200,000		C - dying in a plane crash when flying with the bottom 25 airlines (based on safety record)
1:843,744		D - dying in a plane crash when flying with the top 25 airlines (based on safety record)
1:750,000		E - dying in an automobile accident
1:649,740		F - dying in an automobile accident this year
1:72,193		G - Four of a Kind (5 Card Stud)
1:12,300		H - Full House (5 Card Stud)
1:6,250		I - High Card only (5 Card Stud)
1:4,165		J - Pair (5 Card Stud)
1:1,024		K - Royal Flush (5 Card Stud)
1:694		L - Straight (5 Card Stud)
1:509		M - Straight Flush (5 Card Stud)
1:255		N - Flush (5 Card Stud)
1:158		O - Three of a Kind (5 Card Stud)
1:100 (1%)		P - Two Pair (5 Card Stud)
1:47.3 (2.1%)		Q - hitting the Powerball jackpot
1:40 (2.5%)		R - winning the Illinois lottery
1:33 (3%)		S - a given female will ever be diagnosed with cancer (US)
1:21 (4.8%)		T - a flipped coin will land on 'Heads'
1:12 (8%)		U - a flipped coin will land on 'Heads' 10 times in a row
1:2.67 (37.5%)		V - a given male will ever be diagnosed with cancer (US)
1:2.4 (41.7%)		W - a given non-smoking U.S. white male will die of lung cancer (white males have the most lung cancer)
1:2.23 (44.8%)		X - a given pregnant woman will have twins
1:2 (50%)		Y - a given U.S. white male smoker will die of lung cancer (white males have the most lung cancer)
1:1.99 (50.2%)		Z - the quarter mile-wide asteroid, MN2004, will strike the Earth on April 13, 2029 (as predicted in Dec 2004)

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What're the Odds? Quiz

by Davidmon5

Created Jan 10, 2011 in Science
Game Plays 1,228

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	Davidmon5:	Jan 10th, 2011 at 22:13 GMT	1 point
	Get up in four hours for an international flight, but I'll try to get all of my sources posted here in the comments section sometime next week; there were a lot of vastly different numbers out there and I tried to pick the most accurate sources.

	SuperSquall:	Jan 10th, 2011 at 22:44 GMT	8 points
	Hope you're flying a top 25 airline!

Comment below threshold: show it

	Davidmon5:	Jan 11th, 2011 at 02:49 GMT	1 point
	Iberia. No regionals. Thanks. :)

	Pit_trout:	Jan 11th, 2011 at 07:13 GMT	8 points
	Awesomely clever quiz! The “Deep Impact” clue maybe needs rewording to clarify: the probability you give is the highest it was estimated at, briefly, in 2004; since then, further observations have confirmed (happily) that its chances of hitting the earth are minusculs, so we can sleep easy (except for worrying about cancer, car crashes, unexpected twins etc.).

	Davidmon5:	Jan 13th, 2011 at 01:04 GMT	1 point
	Sorry about that!

	jmwhitestripes12:	Jan 19th, 2011 at 01:20 GMT	2 points
	Vote up for random guessing

	strags11:	Jan 19th, 2011 at 02:04 GMT	1 point
	Cute quiz. With my luck, I'll be struck by lightning while holding a royal flush.

	demaio:	Jan 20th, 2011 at 02:32 GMT	3 points
	MN2004, as someone already stated, has virtually no chance of hitting us in 2029 (according to more recent measurements), and 270 meters is not a quarter-mile wide. Other than that, great quiz!

	Dickson105:	Jan 27th, 2011 at 16:17 GMT	0 points
	what's the Powerball?

	Davidmon5:	Jan 28th, 2011 at 03:43 GMT	3 points
	Still haven't posted my sources, but they're saved in my browser history. Crazy busy at work and worked through the last two weekends. I'll try to get it out there this weekend, to include the Powerball website. Powerball is a joint lottery between multiple states. There are more numbers, making the odds to win lower, but the jackpots are therefore usually much bigger.

	Yousername:	Jan 29th, 2011 at 00:25 GMT	2 points
	Reword the ones that start with "A ____ will" to be "A given ____ will" because it is almost guarunteed that a male will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in the future.

	White:	Jan 29th, 2011 at 15:55 GMT	2 points
	Great quiz! The thing is though, having all answers as one letter does, as jmwhitestripes12 (I think) said, make it easy to get everything by guessing letters. Even without looking you could be almost guaranteed (I know this is a probability thing but I don't think I'll work out the exact odds!) to get 26/26 just by guessing systematically. A suggestion is that you change the times up to about 7 minutes from 4 and instead of having A, B, C, ..., Z, have a similar system that discourages as much guessing; one I can think of is Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, ..., Zulu or something similar. This way, people won't guess Alpha (for example) over and over again and so are less likely to win by doing so. I know I might be reading too much into it but seeing that only about 75% get the odds of a head (I missed it!) makes me think this is the case.

	dt022:	Jan 29th, 2011 at 21:09 GMT	1 point
	To White (I might sound racist for that) I dont think it really matters, if people were on sporcle to play sporcle they would guess the answers for what they believe, not in a random order. If they choose to type letters in randomly, so be it.

	White:	Jan 30th, 2011 at 00:54 GMT	1 point
	In that case I just want a bit more time. The fact that the six most guessed answers are the six at the top of the quiz (in order!) helps prove my point. Oh, and a 5/5 rating from me :)

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 03:03 GMT	1 point
	Odds of winning the Powerball: http://www.powerball.com/powerball/pb_prizes.asp Odds of winning the IL lottery: http://www.justlottery.com/illinois/illinois-games.html

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 03:10 GMT	1 point
	One of many poker odds sites: http://wizardofodds.com/poker Note that this website lists the probabilities as percentages. For a percentage, you divide the number of hands that match what you're looking for by the total number of possible five card hands (2,598,960). For a ratio, you do the opposite. For example, for a royal flush, there are four possible hands that match the criteria (one for each suit). The percentage probability is 4/2,598,960=0.00000154=0.000154%, whereas the ratio is 1:(2,598,960/4)=1:649,740.

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 03:28 GMT	1 point
	The meteor: http://www.space.com/627-asteroid-watch-odds-2029-collision-stuck-1-40.html Since Dec 2004, "2004 MN4" has been renamed "99942 Apophis," the estimated diameter has dropped from 1,480 ft to 885 ft, and a 2029 impact has been ruled out (though there is a small chance, 1:250,000, that it will impact on its next pass in 2036).

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 03:39 GMT	1 point
	@Yousername: Picky, but you're right. Fixed.

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 03:42 GMT	1 point
	@White: I know everyone's guessing, you can tell by the results. Surely not everyone on sporcle is that good at calculating probability. Hell, even I start typing in random letters when it gets down to 30 seconds. I added two more minutes for those who want to seriously take the quiz and read the questions, but it does have the drawback of making it easy to get a 100% by randomly typing. I'll consider the Alpha Bravo Charlie thing, but I honestly don't mind if people "cheat" on this one, as the quiz still puts things into perspective when the answers are revealed, whether you guess them or not.

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 03:46 GMT	1 point
	Lightning: http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/medical.htm Notice that this is actually the National Weather Service website. There were a TON of news articles and other websites that claimed to quote the National Weather Services' estimated odds of getting struck by lightning, but they all had wildly different numbers! They are using very crude numbers on this website to come up with the odds, with a lot of rounding: 300,000 for the US population, 750,000 reported deaths and injuries, 80 year life span...

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 03:49 GMT	2 points
	I really wanted to put the odds of getting struck by lightning twice, but the only websites I could find merely squared the odds of getting struck once (and they misquoted the National Weather Service for the odds of getting struck once). That is to say, I was interested in whether you were more or less likely to get struck by lightning a second time if you've already been struck once, based on actual reported incidents. Like maybe once you've been struck it's actually more likely you'll be struck again because of some chemical composition of your body or a surgically implanted metal plate or because you're an avid golfer. Or maybe it's less likely because you're dead.

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 03:49 GMT	1 point
	All of the websites about getting struck by lightning twice treat it as an independent event. Like the flipping of the perfectly balanced coin on a frictionless plane.

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 03:57 GMT	1 point
	Lots of conflicting numbers for plane crashes. I used this one: http://planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm See Also: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/your-chances-of-dying-in-a-plane-crash-it-depends-on-where-you-fly-20100906-14wri.html And, an odds of death website so ridiculously detailed it was useless for the purposes of this quiz: http://www.purewatergazette.net/oddsofdying.htm

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 04:01 GMT	1 point
	Let me preface the "smoking" discussion by saying that I think it is stupid and dangerous. I made my wife quit when we got married. However, it is incredibly frustrating how much misinformation is out there. The truth is bad enough, you don't need to keep it from people to push an anti-smoking agenda.

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 04:03 GMT	3 points
	For example, there is no way that chewing tobacco has exactly the same chance of causing cancer as smoking cigarettes. They are very different, surely they have very different effects. But in the FAQ section of the National Cancer Institute's website (cancer.gov), they answer the question "Is using smokeless tobacco less hazardous than smoking cigarettes?" by saying "Because all tobacco products are harmful and cause cancer, the use of all of these products should be strongly discouraged." Way to not even slightly answer the question.

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 04:06 GMT	1 point
	If chewing is more dangerous than smoking because of the higher nicotine content, or if smoking is more dangerous because of the tar in your lungs, don't people deserve to know which is worse? What if a chewer has decided he isn't able to quit tobacco, but decides to change to cigarettes because they have less nicotine and he believes they are safer? If he's actually doubling his chances of dying, shouldn't that information be out there?

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 04:09 GMT	1 point
	Similarly, in LiveStrong's article entitled "A Smoker's Real Chances of Getting Cancer," they never actually address a smoker's chances of getting cancer. They just talk about how many cases are diagnosed, etc.

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 04:12 GMT	1 point
	It's like no low numbers are allowed to be published, and it becomes largely a matter of semantics. An 8% chance of dying from lung cancer for a smoker is actually pretty huge, considering all of the plane crashes and car crashes and lightning storms and serial killers and Quarter Pounders out there. But if it was phrased "88.9% of those who die from lung cancer are smokers," it sounds more like something you might actually see in print. (If a non-smoker has a 1% chance of dying and a smoker has an 8% chance, all lung cancer deaths break down into 88.9%/11.1%)

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 04:15 GMT	1 point
	The odds of dying from lung cancer for a smoker and non-smoker came from this editorial: http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/Editorials/Vol-1/e1-4.htm The author also had an agenda, in the other extreme. Instead of cherry-picking the cases of smokers who died from lung cancer, he could have looked at smokers who CONTRACT cancer (but either are cured or die from something else first), and he could have looked at any kind of cancer, instead of focusing exclusively on lung cancer. If the question was "what are the odds that a smoker will get cancer at some point in their lifetime," it would be much higher than 8%.

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 23:46 GMT	1 point
	Twins: http://multiples.about.com/cs/funfacts/a/oddsoftwins.htm

	Davidmon5:	Jan 31st, 2011 at 23:50 GMT	1 point
	Cancer diagnosis: http://www.bookofodds.com/Accidents-Death/Death-Rates/Articles/A0219-Dying-of-Cancer

	zifyoip:	Feb 5th, 2011 at 21:51 GMT	4 points
	@Davidmon5: "If a non-smoker has a 1% chance of dying and a smoker has an 8% chance, all lung cancer deaths break down into 88.9%/11.1%." It works out that way only if there are the same number of smokers as non-smokers. In reality something like 23% of adults are smokers in the United States. Supposing there are 225 million adults in the U.S., that means there are about 52 million smokers and about 173 million nonsmokers. One percent of the nonsmokers will die from lung cancer, making 1.73 million nonsmoker deaths, while eight percent of the smokers will die from lung cancer, making 4.16 million smoker deaths. So, out of a total of 5.89 million deaths from lung cancer, about 71% are smokers, not 89%.

	Davidmon5:	Feb 10th, 2011 at 01:31 GMT	1 point
	You are correct. I realized my error after I submitted the comment, but it seemed like the game had died off by then anyway. But the assertion that it's semantics instead of statistics stands. An 8% chance of dying from lung cancer sounds low (it's single digits) while 71% of lung cancer deaths being smokers sounds much bigger. Thank you for clarifying the real odds, though.

	Sforzando:	Feb 11th, 2011 at 23:49 GMT	1 point
	Great quiz.

	Davidmon5:	Feb 14th, 2011 at 11:54 GMT	2 points
	"71% of those who die from lung cancer are smokers, even they only account for a quarter of the population." Sounds much worse than 8%.

	tsneller:	Dec 2nd, 2011 at 00:28 GMT	1 point
	I really think you need to put in wrong answers for all other letters for each clue, as I got them all with 1:57 remaining by just putting in each of the letters for each of the clues