ABSTRACT
PROBABILITY CAN BE DEFINED in both the general and the mathematical senses. We might, for example, say ‘it is probable that you will understand this book’. From this we could infer that the reader has a greater chance of understanding the text than of being bewildered by it. But such an expression can be interpreted in only the vaguest of terms, and scientists prefer to use the word in a more rigorous fashion, attaching some numerical value to the probability of an event. This numerical probability can be expressed in either of two ways – on an absolute scale of zero to one, or on a percentage scale of zero to 100. Both are widely used.
