Which question is being asked in this story problem? max has a box of marbles and spinning tops. there are 15 marbles and 8 spinning tops in his box. max gives his brother four marbles. max's brother already had three marbles. how many items are left in max's box? a. how many marbles does max's brother have now? b. how many marbles does max have left in his box? c. how many marbles and spinning tops does max have in his box now? d. how many spinning tops did max give to his brother?

the answer   is 200

step-by-step explanation:

this is a problem about poisson probabilities.   i don't know if you've

already studied poisson distributions, or if you have a place to look

to read more about the subject.  

here's how you can see a poisson distribution coming.   when there are

a lot of events that may happen at any time (or any place), and when

you're counting how many of them happen at a particular time (or a

particular place), and each event is independent of the others, then

the result is a poisson distribution.   this is roughly true for the

chocolate chips; one chip being in a cookie has only a small effect on

the probability that another chip will be in the cookie.

once you know you have a poisson distribution, you know a lot.   there

is only one parameter to a poisson distribution, so if you know the

mean, you know everything.   the form of the distribution is

  probability of n chips = {[e^(-x)]*(x^n)} / (n! )