Practice worksheet
You are encouraged to select more questions from Chapter 8 of the text book.
Q1. An economist uses the price of a gallon of milk as a measure of inflation. She finds that the
average price is 3.82 per gallon and the population standard deviation is $0.33. You decide to
sample 40 convenience stores, collect their prices for a gallon of milk, and compute the mean price
for the sample.
a. What is the standard error of the mean in this experiment?
b. What is the probability that the sample mean is between $3.78 and $3.86?
c. What is the probability that the difference between the sample mean and the population mean is
less than $0.01?
d. What is the likelihood the sample mean is greater than $3.92?
Q2. Based on all student records at Camford University, students spend an average of 5.5 hours
per week playing organized sports. The population’s standard deviation is 2.2 hours per week.
Based on a sample of 121 students, Healthy Lifestyles Incorporated (HLI) would like to apply the
central limit theorem to make various estimates.
a. Compute the standard error of the sample mean.
b. What is the chance HLI will find a sample mean between 5 and 6 hours?
c. Calculate the probability that the sample mean will be between 5.3 and 5.7 hours.
d. How strange would it be to obtain a sample mean greater than 6.5 hours?
Q3. At the downtown office of First National Bank, there are five tellers. Last week, the tellers
made the following number of errors each: 2, 3, 5, 3, and 5.
a. How many different samples of two tellers are possible?
b. List all possible samples of size 2 and compute the mean of each.
c. Compute the mean of the sample means and compare it to the population mean.
Solution:
Q1.
$0.33
a. Standard Error= = $0.052
√40
̅𝑥̅̅1̅−𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 3.78−3.82 0.04 ̅𝑥̅̅2̅−𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 3.86−3.82
b. 𝑧1 = = − 0.052 = −0.769, 𝑧2 = = = 0.769
𝑆𝐸 0.052 𝑆𝐸 0.052
That probability is 0.5581 from z table for −0.769 < 𝑧 < 0.769.
c. If the difference between sample mean and the population mean is $0.01 then
𝑥̅ − 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 < 0.01 → 𝑥̅ − 3.82 < 0.01 → 𝑥̅ < 3.83
3.83−3.82
Find the z value for 3.83 which is = 0.19. Therefore,
0.052
𝑃(𝑥̅ < 3.83) = 𝑃(𝑧 < 0.19) = 0.57613.
d. To find the probability that the sample mean greater than $3.92 means we first need to
3.92−3.82
find the z-value for 3.92 which is 0.052 = 1.92. Therefore,
𝑃(𝑥̅ > 3.83) = 𝑃(𝑧 > 1.92) = 0.97276.
The likelihood that the sample mean is greater than $3.92 is 0.9726.
Q3. Total number of samples is 5C2=10.
Population mean is 𝜇 = (2 + 3 + 5 + 3 + 5)/5 = 3.6
Sampling distribution of the sample means is
2.5+3.5+2.5+3.5+4+3+4+4+5+4 36
Sample mean is 𝜇𝑥̅ = = 10 = 3.6.
10
The two means are the same.
