Euromillions
The Euromillions lottery jackpot today is £166 million pounds. To hit the Jackpot you need to correctly pick 5 numbers between 1 and 50 and two numbers between 1 and 11. The odds of you achieving this are apparently 117 million to one (according to the euromillions own website) To demonstrate just how unlikely that is, lets have a maths lesson. Of course, your odds are 117 million to one if you pick something like 3 15 28 37 43 4 8. What if you picked 1 2 3 4 5 6 7? Never going to happen right? Actually your odds of winning are exactly the same. Still going to buy a ticket? In statistics you figure out the likelyhood of an event occuring and assign it a number between 0 and 1 (0 means zero chance and 1 means certain). Lets think about a coin to make things simple. The likelyhood of flipping a 'Head' is 0.5 and the likelyhood of flipping a 'Tail' is 0.5 (in any given flip). So what are the odds of flipping two Heads in a row? Well we take the odds and multiply them