Tutorial 4 – Solutions to Supplementary Questions

The normal distribution

1. Serum triglyceride. In Serum triglyceride was measured from the cord blood of 282 babies
(Bland M. An Introduction to Statistics. pg 56). The levels ranged from 0.15 up to 1.66 mmol/L.

From inspection of a histogram it was decided that the serum triglyceride levels were not
normally distributed and the data were logarithm to the base 10 (log 10 ) transformed. The
histogram of the serum triglyceride levels (log 10 units) was bell shaped and thus normally
distributed.

a. The mean serum triglyceride level in log10 units was -0.33 and the standard deviation
was 0.17 (log10 units).
The range of serum triglyceride levels (log 10 units) where 95% of the babies lie within
was -0.66 up to 0.003 (log 10 units).
When variables are normally distributed, approximately 95% of the data lie within +/-
1.96 standard deviations of the mean, that is, z-scores of -1.96 and +1.96.

Now z=-1.96 (i.e. 1.96 SDs below the mean) corresponds to serum triglyceride level
(log 10 units) of -0.66 (-0.33 – (1.96×0.17)).
And z=+1.96 (i.e. 1.96 SDs above the mean) corresponds to serum triglyceride level
(log 10 units) of 0.003 (-0.33 + (1.96×0.17)).