A local college student will be randomly selected to attend a leadership conference in Washington, D.C. There are 2020 local college students, of which 40% are male. 480 of the college students are graduate students, and half of the graduate students are female. Which of the following best represents the probability that the selected college student will be a male student or a graduate student?

The number of students that are graduate students is 480, from this quantity 240 are female and 240 are male. So, there are 1540 not graduated students.

For calculate the probability of select a college student that will be a male student or a graduate student is necessary to know the number of graduate students that are male.

Let call x the number of male from not graduated student. From the question we know that the 40% of the 2020 students are male and 240 of the graduate students are male too. So we can formulate the following equation:

240 + x = 2020(0.4)

x=568

So, there are 568 male from not graduated students.

Then the probability can be calculate as:

[tex]P=\frac{ 480 + 568 }{ 2020}[/tex]

Because there are 480 students that are graduated beetween male and female and from not graduate students there are 568 that are male. So the total number of students that are male or graduate students are 1040. Finally the probabilitty is:

P=1024/2020 = 0.5188