In 1935, harvard linguist george zipf i wanted out that the frequency of the kth most frequent word in a language is roughly proportional to 1/k. this implies that the second most frequent word in a language has a frequency of one half that of the most frequent word, the third most frequent word has a frequency of one third that of the most frequent word, and so on. a distribution that follows this rule is said to obay zipf's law.

zipf's lawhas been observed not only in word distributions, but in other phenomenona as well, such as populations in a city.

the frequency of the third most frequent word in the brown corpus is that of the most frequent word.

a. 41%
b. 34%
c. 33%
d. 50%