5/3/2021 Apex Learning - Audio Transcript

Transcript: Intervals

Now that we've worked with confidence intervals for a while, it's not hard to come up with a general form
for them.

To construct a confidence interval for a population mean, choose a simple random sample from a
population having unknown mean µ and an estimate of the standard deviation σ. A level C confidence
interval for µ is

Here, z* is the value on the standard normal curve with area C between -z* and z*.

Let's say we decide to conduct another study. This time we're interested in the jumping capabilities of
toads in your area of the country. We conduct the study in a similar fashion, but this time we collect 250
toads. In our sample, the mean jump length is 9.2 cm. The standard deviation of jump lengths for
individual toads is estimated to be 4.8 cm. Let's create a 90% confidence interval for the mean jump
length of all toads in your area of the country. To do this, we'll use this formula.

We're 90% confident that the true mean jump length for toads in your area of the country is between 8.7
cm and 9.7 cm. Notice for this interval that even though the standard deviation was 4.8 cm, much larger
than for frogs, the margin or error was still small. This is because we increased our sample size from 25
to 250. In general, larger sample sizes will result in narrower confidence intervals.

https://course.apexlearning.com/public/cpop/7001002/1968321 1/1