Answer to Question #6165 in Statistics and Probability for Jane

Question

QUESTION 3. Determine the number of possible of outcomes when tossing one coin, two coins, and three coins. Then determine the number of possible outcomes for tossing 'n' coins. Explain your reasoning.

Answer 1

We can get two outcomes when tossing one coin (head and tail), three results when tossing two coins (head and head, tail and tail, head and tail) and results when tossing three coins (head-head-head, head-head-tail, head-tail-tail, tail-tail-tail). So, the number of possible outcomes when tossing n coins is n+1. You can obviously see that the number of possible outcomes is obtained by counting the number of different sets of n elements (head and tail).