AMC 10 Step by Step
2012 AMC 10BProblem 18P16-20~4 minPrint

Suppose that one of every 500 people in a certain population has a particular disease, which displays no symptoms. A blood test is available for screening for this disease. For a person who has this disease, the test always turns out positive. For a person who does not have the disease, however, there is a 2%2\% false positive rate--in other words, for such people, 98%98\% of the time the test will turn out negative, but 2%2\% of the time the test will turn out positive and will incorrectly indicate that the person has the disease. Let pp be the probability that a person who is chosen at random from this population and gets a positive test result actually has the disease. Which of the following is closest to pp ?

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