University of Georgia
EMAT 6690
Claudette Tucker
Essay Four
InterMath: Mystery Envelopes
Investigation
We know that we have chosen an envelope that contains ten dollars with the following stipulations:
Since only one of the envelopes contains twice as much as the other and since we have possession of ten dollars, we can conclude that the remaining envelope has either five or twenty dollars. This means that the likelihood of a loss or a gain is equal, a fifty-fifty chance of both dollar amounts. So, we should analyze the amount of money that we can gain or loss. We could loss five dollars or gain ten more dollars. Switching the envelopes seems favorable considering that we started without any money. If the new envelope contains twenty dollars, we will gain four times the amount of our possible loss.