6B COMMUNICATIVE Lucky numbers

Student A

a Answer the questions with a partner.

1 Do you have a ‘lucky number’? Why do you think it’s lucky for you?
2 What do you think are the chances of winning a big prize on your country’s national lottery?
3 Do you ever do the lottery? If not, do you know people who do?
4 Do you just choose any old number, or do you have a system?
5 Have you ever won anything? Do you know anyone who has?

b Read an extract from the book Humble Pi, by Matt Parker, and make notes on the main points.
Tell B what you learned about lottery numbers. Then listen to B tell you about their extract.

Can I predict what number is going to come up?

Much of the pseudoscience around lottery draws tries to cloak itself as being
mathematical and is normally a variation on the gambler’s fallacy. This logical
fallacy is that, if some random event has not happened for a while, then it is ‘due’.
But if events are truly random and independent, then an outcome cannot be more
or less likely based on what has come before it.
Yet people track which numbers have not come up in the lottery recently to see
which ones are due an appearance. This reached fever pitch in Italy in 2005, when
the number 53 had not been seen for nearly two years. Loads of people felt that 53
was due, and at least €3.5 billion was spent buying tickets with the number 53.
People were borrowing money to place bets as 53 continued not to get drawn and
so was, apparently, more and more overdue. Those se
with a system kept increasing their stake each
week so that when 53 finally arrived, they would
recoup all their previous losses. Players were going
ng
bankrupt, and in the lead-up to 53 finally being
drawn, on 9th February 2005, four people died
(one lone suicide and a second suicide who took
their family’s lives as well).
Another thing that happens is that people
mistakenly think that recent results are unlikely
to happen again. In 2009, the Bulgarian lottery
drew the same numbers (4, 15, 23, 24 and 42)
two weeks in a row. They were drawn in a
different order, but in a lottery, the order does
not matter. Amazingly, no one won the jackpot
the first time they were drawn, but the following
week eighteen people had chosen them in the
hope they would come up again. The Bulgarian
authorities launched an investigation to check
nothing untoward was going on, but the
lottery organizers said that it was just random
probability. And they were right.

c Were you surprised by any of the information? If you do the lottery, will it change the way you play?
Has it made you more or less hopeful about your chances of winning? If you don’t do the lottery,
does it make you want to give it a go?

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 6B COMMUNICATIVE Lucky numbers

Student B

a Answer the questions with a partner.

1 Do you have a ‘lucky number’? Why do you think it’s lucky for you?
2 What do you think are the chances of winning a big prize on your country’s national lottery?
3 Do you ever do the lottery? If not, do you know people who do?
4 Do you just choose any old number, or do you have a system?
5 Have you ever won anything? Do you know anyone who has?

b Read an extract from the book Humble Pi, by Matt Parker, and make notes on the main points.
Listen to A tell you about their extract. Then tell A what you learned about winning the jackpot.

How can I increase my chances of

winning the jackpot?
The only legitimate mathematical strategy you have
is to choose numbers that other people are less
likely to have picked. Humans are not very creative
at choosing their numbers. On 23rd March 2016,
the winning lottery numbers were 7, 14, 21, 35, 41
and 42. Only one off from a run of all multiples
of seven. An incredible 4,082 people matched five
numbers that week (presumably the five multiples
of seven) so the prize money had to be shared
between about eighty more people than normal:
they only got £15 each. It is believed that in the
UK, around ten thousand people all choose 1, 2, 3,
4, 5 and 6 every week. If they do ever come up, the
winners will not get much each.
Top tips are to choose numbers which are not in
an obvious sequence, aren’t likely to be numbers
from dates (people choose birthdays, anniversaries,
and so on). Then if you play the lottery weekly
for millions of years (you’d expect to win the UK
lottery once every 780,000 years), on the occasions
you do win, you will have to share the prize less.
Sadly, it’s not a strategy that helps much on the
timescale of a human lifetime.
So the top tip is, if you do play the lottery, just
choose whatever numbers you want. I think the only
advantage of choosing really random numbers is
that they look like the numbers that come up most
weeks, which helps keep the illusion alive that you
could win. And, at the end of the day, that illusion
of maybe winning is what you are really buying.

c Were you surprised by any of the information? If you do the lottery, will it change the way you play?
Has it made you more or less hopeful about your chances of winning? If you don’t do the lottery,
does it make you want to give it a go?

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