ST104a Statistics 1 Digital Innovations Home Assignment 4

Confidence Intervals
Deadline: Sunday 23:59, December 6, 2020

1. (2018) The scores on a verbal reasoning test are normally distributed with a population
mean of µ = 100 and a population standard deviation of σ = 10.
(a) What is the probability that a randomly chosen person scores at least 105?
(b) A simple random sample of size n = 20 is selected. What is the probability that
the sample mean will be between 97 and 104? (You may use the nearest values provided
in the statistical tables.)

2. National figures for a blood test result have been collected and the population standard
deviation is 1.2. You take a sample of 100 observations and find a sample mean of 25
units. Provide a 95% confidence interval for the mean.

3. Measurements of the diameter of a random sample of 200 ball bearings produced by a

machine gave a sample mean x̄ = 0.824. The sample standard deviation was s = 0.042.
Find a 95% confidence interval and a 99% confidence interval for the true mean value of
the diameter of ball bearings.

4. A random sample of 200 students is observed. 30 of them say they are ’really enjoying’
Statistics.
(a) Calculate the proportion of students in this sample saying they are ’really enjoying’
Statistics and then provide a 95% confidence interval for this value.
You now take a further random sample, in another institution. This time there are 20
students and 8 say they are ’really enjoying’ Statistics.
(b) Provide a 95% confidence interval for this value. Think about why the two
confidence intervals are different.
(c) Provide a 95% confidence interval for the difference between the two proportions.

5. (2018) You are told that a 99% confidence interval for a single population proportion is
(0.3676,0.5324)
(a) What was the sample proportion that lead to this confidence interval?
(b) What was the size of the sample used?

6. A business requires an expensive check on the value of stock in its warehouse. In order to
do this, a random sample of 50 items is observed and valued. The average value of these
is computed to be $320.41 with a (sample) standard deviation of $40.60. It is known that
there are 9,875 items in total stock.
(a) Estimate the total value of the stock to the nearest $10, 000.
(b) Calculate a 95% confidence interval for the mean value of all items and hence
determine a 95% confidence interval for the total value of the stock.

7. (2017 preliminary
exam) Random
samples are taken from two populations with distri-
butions N µX , σ 2 and N µY , σ 2 . The summary statistics for the two samples are as
follows:
 Sample size Sample mean Sample variance
x values 19 8.2 1.69
y values 12 6.3 2.56
(a) Compute a 98% confidence interval for the difference between the two population
means. Does the result support the view that there is a difference between the population
means? Explain your reasoning.
(b) Would a 95% confidence interval be better? Explain why or why not. (Do not
compute a 95% confidence interval.)

8. The reaction times, in seconds, for eight police officers were found to be:

0.28 0.23 0.21 0.26 0.29 0.21 0.25 0.22

Determine a 90% confidence interval for the mean reaction time of all police officers.

9. A random sample of 100 voters contained 60 Labour supporters. Give a 95% confidence
interval for the proportion of Labour voters in the population.

10. A sample of 954 adults in early 1987 found that 23% of them held shares.
(a) Given a UK adult population of 41 million, and assuming a proper random sample
was taken, find a 95% confidence interval for the number of shareholders in the UK. A
’similar’ survey the previous year had found a total of 7 million shareholders.
(b) Assuming ’similar’ means the same sample size, find a 95% confidence interval for
the increase in shareholders between the two years.

11. (2017) The student union of a large university gathered a random sample of 525 students
to determine whether they are in favour of a new examination timetable. The table below
summarises the student responses.
In favour of
Subject area Sample size new examination timetable
Humanities 325 221
Science 200 120
Compute a 97% confidence interval for the difference of proportions with positive re-
sponses between humanities and science degrees in the population.

12. Two advertising companies each give quotations for nine different campaigns. Their
quotations (in $000s) are shown in the following table. Calculate a 95% confidence interval
for the true difference between mean quotations. Can you deduce from this confidence
interval if one company is more expensive than the other?
Company 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
A 39 24 36 42 45 30 38 32 39
B 46 26 32 39 51 34 37 41 44
13. A college contains 12,000 students. A random sample of 400 students are interviewed and
it is found that 240 use the refectory. Use these data to calculate:
(a) a 95% confidence interval
(b) a 99% confidence interval for the total number of students who use the refectory.
The college catering officer claims that the refectory is used by at least 9,000 students
and that the survey has yielded a low figure due to sampling variability. Is this claim
reasonable?

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14. Based on a random sample of 2 observations, consider two competing estimators of the
population mean µ:

1 1
X̄ = X1 + X2
2 2
and
1 2
U = X1 + X2
3 3
(a) Are they unbiased?
(b) Which estimator is more efficient?