Cluster Innovation Centre, University of Delhi

M.Sc. (Mathematics Education)

End Term Examination: 2019-2020, Semester-II
Paper Code: II.1 (1913201)
Paper Name: Demystifying the power of data: Probability & Statistics
Max Marks: 75
This question paper contains six questions, out of which any four are to be attempted. Each question
carries equal marks. You may use Z-tables, t-tables and χ 2− tables for calculations.

1. A polytechnic offers a short course on advanced statistical methods. As the course involves a large
amount of practical work only 8 places are available. Advertising starts two months before the course
and if, at the end of one month, 3 or fewer places have been taken, the course is cancelled. If 4 or more
places have been taken by the end of one month, the course is run regardless of the number of
applications received in the second month. If the number of applications per month follows a Poisson
distribution with mean 3.6, and places are allocated on a first come first served basis, what is the
probability that the course will run with 8 students?

2. An insurance company wants to audit health insurance claims in its very large database of transactions.
In a quick attempt to assess the level of overstatement of this database, the insurance company selects at
random 400 items from the database (each item represents a dollar amount). Suppose that the population
mean overstatement of the entire database is $8, with population standard deviation $20. Find the
probability that the sample mean of the 400 would be less than $6.50.The population from where the
sample of 400 was selected does not follow the normal distribution. Why?

3. In a large multinational company, the following is the joint PDF between an employee’s gender (X) and
whether the person holds an executive position Y (= 1 executive position; = 0 non- executive position):

Determine whether X and Y are independent and use your knowledge about conditional probability and
independence to decide whether there is sexual bias in promotion to an executive position within the
company.

4. In a study of maximal aerobic capacity, 12 women were used as subjects and one measurement that was
made was blood plasma volume. The following data give their blood plasma volumes in liters;

3.15 2.99 2.77 3.12 2.45 3.85

2.99 3.87 4.06 2.94 3.53 3.20

Assume that these are observations of a normally distributed random variable X that has mean μ  and
standard deviation σ .  Find a 90% confidence interval of unknown mean μ.

5. Suppose it is known that the average income for families living in New England last year was $50000.
We want to know whether or not the average yearly income of families in Providence is significantly less
than the average yearly income in New England. Unfortunately, we don’t know the variance of incomes
in Providence or in New England. All we have is the following 30 incomes (from last year) taken
randomly from families in Providence (all entries are in dollars). Using this information, test the
hypothesis that the average yearly income of families in Providence is below that of the average family
in New England at the α = .05 level.

6. The breakdowns of a computer for 325 days are given below;

Breakdowns 0 1 2 3 4
Days 208 92 20 5 0

Do the breakdowns follow Poisson distribution? Test this hypothesis with CHI-SQUARE test
considering α = 0.05 level of significance.