One letter tile is randomly drawn from a set of 26 alphabet tiles representing letters A through Z. What is the probability that the letter drawn is a vowel or is in the word “now”? Give your answer as a fraction in reduced form.

1 Answer
AbhilashGM
Apr 2, 2018

The answer is #7/26#.

Explanation:

The probability that the letter is a vowel is #5/26# since there are 5 vowels in the 26 alphabets.

The probability that the letter is in the word 'now' is #3/26#, since there are three distinct letters in the word 'now'.

But, the letter 'o' is in both sets of options, i.e. o is a vowel and o is in the word 'now', so it cannot be double-counted.

So, the total probability we are after is #5/26+3/26-1/26=7/26#.

Another way of thinking about this is just to write out all the options: A, E, I, O, U, N, W. When you count them up, there are seven distinct letters.

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