My daughter needed some help with her stats homework (she's taking AP Statistics in high school). Up until now, I've been able to help her since stats is something I took an awful lot of in college...I was an Industrial Engineering major.

But last night, she had some formulas I either have never seen before or flat don't remember and couldn't quite figure out how to solve it. To all my fellow engineers out there, I'm sure you appreciate how an unsolved problem eats at you.

The question went something like this:

There is a ballot measure that 47% of the population is in favor of. If you poll a random sample of 500 people, what are the chances that over 50% of poll respondents are in favor of the measure?

Everything I can remember and my google-fu shows me how to calculate the probability of getting exactly 251 yea's to 249 nay's given a 47% chance of yea. But the only things I can find for calculating the probability of 251 yea's or 252 or 253 or....500 yea's is to calculate each probability individually and add them all up. Given they've not used Minitab or even Excel in class for massive number crunching, I'm pretty sure that isn't the answer they were looking for.

Anyone out there got their stats more polished than mine (or have more time to google it than I do) who knows how to get the answer?