ADS - Circulation aérienne - Epreuve d'Anglais - 2019

 

Text : Quantifying Uncertainty

 

 

"The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability."

 

Probability plays a special role in our lives, because we use it to measure uncertainty. We are continually faced with decisions that lead to uncertain outcomes, and we rely on probability to help us choose our course of action. In business, probability is a pivotal factor in most significant decisions. A department store buyer will order large quantities of a new style that is predicted to sell well. A company will introduce a new product when the chance of its success seems high enough to outweigh the possibility of losses due to its failure. A new college graduate is hired when the probability for satisfactory performance is judged to be sufficiently high $\ldots$

        A probability is numerical value that measures the uncertainty that a particular event will occur. The probability for an event ordinarily represents the proportion of times under identical circumstances that the event can be expected to occur. Probability theory treats a probability as a number. Such numbers, too, are common. We are all familiar with the weather forecaster's announcement that "there is a $50\%$ chance of rain tomorrow". We may extend our understanding of probability to a family of experiments. The simplest of which is the coin toss, for which there is a $50\%$ chance of obtaining either outcome : head or tail.

 

Source : Lawrence L. Lapin and William D. Whisler, Quantitative Decision Making, $10$th Edition, $2018.$

I. General Comprehension : (each question is worth 2 points)

 

1) What is the text about ?

 

2) How do you understand the epigraph by Marquis de Laplace that opens the text ?

 

3) What is probability for ?

 

4) Give one example mentioned in the text to illustrate the use of probability ?

 

5) Propose another title for the text ? And justify it ?

 

6) How do you interpret the statistics assumption that "there is $50\%$ chance of rain tomorrow" ?

 

II. Detailed Comprehension : (each question is worth 1 point)

 

A) What do the following terms mean in the text ?

 

1. Outcome :

 

2. Pivotal :

 

3. Outweigh :

 

4. Occur :

 

B) Find the opposite for the following in the text ? (each question is worth 1 point)

 

1. Losses :

 

2. Tail :

 

C) Find the synonym for the following in the text ? (each question is worth 1 point)

 

1. Chance :

 

2. Performance :

 

III. Translation

 

Translate the first four sentences in bold into French (the question is worth 2 points)

 

 

$$\text{Durée 3 heures}$$