Bound for Glory. Most people have an intuitive sense of how probabilities work. Here is a passage from Woody Guthrie’s autobiography Bound for Gloryd that demonstrates clear probabilistic reasoning:

A kid named Bud run the gambling wheel. It was an old lopsided bicycle wheel that he had found in the dumps and tried to even up.

He paid you ten to one if you called off the right spoke it would stop on. But there was sixty spokes.

(a) Draw a graph of the probability density function curve for Bud’s gambling wheel. Assume the bicycle wheel has been evened up to create a uniform distribution for values between 1 and 60.

(b) What is the expected value on a dollar bet?