Professional Documents
Culture Documents
a) Imagine Harvard, made up of 52% women, is hosting a Britney Spears concert (and
only fans of Britney attend, randomly selected). Whats the probability that the
person sitting next to you at the concert is a woman?
b) There is a line at the snack bar for the concert with 10 people. What is the
probability that exactly 5 of these students are women?
Let X = the count out of women out of 10 people. Thus X~Bin(n = 10, = 0.330)
Let Y = the count out of women out of 100 people. Thus Y ~ Bin(n = 100,
= 0.330) and approximately [Note: is the square root symbol]:
Y ~ N( = n =100*0.330 = 33.0, =(n(1-))=(100*0.330*0.670) = 4.70)
P(Y 51) = P((Y - 33)/4.7 (51-33)/4.7 = P(Z 3.83) < 0.0002 (off the table)
d) The poll reported that 60% of all college-aged men like Britney Spears? Why
could this be a mistake?
This could easily be a mistake due to selection bias (and non-response bias).
The only people that read the Rolling Stones online may feel a certain way
about Brit-Brit (selection bias). Plus, those that see the link and dont answer
the poll may not really care about Britney, while only those that are passionate
for or against Miss Spears spend the time to fill out the poll (non-response
bias).
Practice Problem #4
A friend of yours is curious to see how confident Harvard students are in
their look. He asks a random sample of n = 130 Harvard students what
percent of Harvard students do you believe I better looking than you?
This sample had a mean of 30.8% and a standard deviation of 24.2%.
***Note: if people had realistic judgments about themselves, the mean
in the population should be 50%.
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Practice Problem #4
a) Calculate the 95% confidence interval to estimate the true mean percent of
students that Harvard students think they are better looking than.
_
x t*(s/n) = 30.81.984(24.2/130) = (26.6, 35.0)
b) Based on your confidence interval in part (a), would you expect a
hypothesis test to determine whether H0: = 50 to be rejected based on a
twosided test?
Yes, we would expect this null hypothesis to be rejected since the value falls
outside the confidence interval (the range of plausible values)
c) Perform the formal hypothesis test as stated in part (b).
H0: = 50
HA: _ 50
t = (x - 0)/(s/n) = (30.8 - 50)/(24.2/130) = -9.05
Looing up this t-value in the t-table we see it is off the charts. So we can
say p-value < 2(0.001) = 0.002.
Since this p-value < 0.05, we can reject the null. There is evidence that the
mean rating is different than 50% (in fact it is less, implying more Harvard
students think they are better looking than they should).
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