One of my two children is a girl. What is the likelihood that the other little treasure is a boy?

achernar

One in two. Apr 16 05, 2:04 AM

onlytrivial

Not quite. There is a slight gap between gender percentages, there being more male births than female. In America, there are about 1050 males born to every 1000 females. So, about 51.5% of births are male. There are, however, more females in the world (50.9%) because of higher life expectancies. So, you have a 51.5% chance of having a boy. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005083.html Apr 16 05, 2:13 AM

Stew54

If you know that the FIRST child is a girl the probability of the second being either a boy or a girl is 50% (disregarding the fact that in different parts of the world slightly more of one or the other sex can be expected to be born on average). But the chances change when you just know that ONE child of two is a girl. There are four possibilites for the order in which the two children were born: BB; BG; GB; or GG. Here we know one is a girl so the BB combination is ruled out, and it's twice as likely that the other child is a boy than a girl. Apr 16 05, 4:17 AM

peasypod

I'm with stewy on this one. 2 out of 3 chance. To quote a certain member from another site, I'll say "Because you know one child is a girl, BB is not possible leaving BG, GB, GG equally probable so the answer is 2/3." .... Apr 16 05, 6:51 PM