In the Mathopia Lottery, 49 balls are numbered 1 to 49 and 6 balls are chosen at random without replacing any of the balls so that 6 different winning numbers are chosen.
Each lottery ticket has 6 numbers and you win a top prize if your 6 numbers match the 6 numbers chosen that week.
What is your chance of winning the top prize? Is buying lottery tickets a waste of money?
If the problem seems difficult, a good problem solving technique is to try simple cases. The Lucky Numbers problem provides a simple case to try.
Click here to download the MATHOPIA-LOTTERY worksheet
Click here to download AIMSSEC-Teacher-Notes-MATHOPIA-LOTTERY
This activity is adapted from the NRICH task Mathsland Lottery with permission of the University of Cambridge. All rights reserved. You can experiment by changing the numbers of balls in the interactivity on the NRICH website.
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