Let's do the activity!

An airline has trained 15 male pilots and 10 female pilots to be captains, but only 8 captain positions are available. A lottery results in 5 females and 3 males being selected. Some of the male pilots who weren’t selected suspect the lottery wasn’t carried out fairly. Is it plausible that these results could happen by chance alone in a fair lottery?

Press the Sample button to select a random sample of 8 pilots from the population of 25 pilots. The number of female pilots in the sample will be displayed and recorded on the dotplot.

For a more detailed discussion, see the description in The Practice of Statistics or Introductory Statistics: A Student-Centered Approach.