What Does Percent Chance Mean?

Wrap-up

Your health is too important to be left up to chance. Understanding probability can help you make sense of complicated information: From the chance it will rain on your outdoor party to the chance a medicine will give you indigestion.

In this lesson you:

• Practiced measuring and comparing probabilities
• Used percents to talk about probability 
• Evaluated risks by ranking probabilities in order of less likely to more likely 

On your own: 

• Test the rules of probability: Find a coin. Pick heads or tails. Flip it 40 times, counting the number of times it lands heads up and tails up. Do your results come close to 1 out of 2 or 50% probability? 
• Be on the lookout for probability. How often do weather forecasters, sports announcers, and health professionals talk about it? 
• Do some health research at the library or on the web. Is there one disease that runs in your family? See if you can find out how factors like diet, exercise, smoking, and ethnicity can raise or lower your chance of developing the disease.