When asked the probability that the sky will fall one student responded /0. What should we have told this 8th grade student about dividing by zero?
To find the probability of something happening, you find out how many different ways the thing you’re looking at can happen, and then divide that by the total number of things that can happen. So you’d have zero, the number of different ways the sky can fall (if you really think it can’t fall), divided by however many things you think CAN happen, which is probably some positive number. In any case, the denominator can’t be zero, since that means that there are zero things that can happen. The difference between 0/0 and 1/0 is sometimes complicated. For instance, if I look at these two sequences: Sequence A: 5*1 5*1/2 5*1/3 5*1/4 5*1/5 —-,——,——,——, ——, … 1 1/2 1/3 1/4 1/5 Sequence B: 1 1 1 1 1 —, —–, —–, —–, —–, … 1 1/2 1/3 1/4 1/5 The numerator and the denominator in Sequence A are both going to zero, so this sequence should be getting closer and closer to 0/0. But notice that every term in this sequence is 5. So the limit of this sequence is 5. And
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