STA 1200 – Practice Quiz #5

1) For a certain type of battery, the lifetimes of batteries under continuous use follow a Normal
distribution with mean 17 hours and standard deviation 0.8 hours.

a) What is the probability that a randomly chosen battery has a lifetime less than 16.7 hours?
(Hint: this is not a sampling distribution problem (yet) because you don’t have a random sample
of batteries, just one randomly chosen battery)

b) What are the mean and standard deviation of the sampling distribution of 𝑥̅ , the average battery
lifetime of a random sample of 60 batteries? Please use correct notation.

c) What is the probability that the average battery lifetime of a random sample of 60 batteries is
less than 16.7 hours? (Explain, in 2 ways, why you can use the Normal calculation)

2) Suppose that 47% of all adult women think they do not get enough time for themselves. An opinion
poll interviews 1025 randomly chosen women and records the sample proportion, 𝑝̂ ,who feel they don’t
get enough time for themselves.

a) What is the mean of the sampling distribution of 𝑝̂ ?

b) What is the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of 𝑝̂ ?

c) Check that the distribution of 𝑝̂ is approximately Normal.

d) Find the probability that 𝑝̂ takes on a value between 0.45 and 0.50.
Solutions

1) For a certain type of battery, the lifetimes of batteries under continuous use follow a Normal
distribution with mean 17 hours and standard deviation 0.8 hours.

a) What is the probability that a randomly chosen battery has a lifetime less than 16.7 hours?

P(X < 16.7) = P(z < -0.38) = 0.3520

[or 0.3557 or 0.3558, depending on how the z-score is rounded]

b) What are the mean and standard deviation of the sampling distribution of 𝑥̅ , the average battery
lifetime of a random sample of 60 batteries? Please use correct notation.

𝜇𝑥̄ = 17, 𝜎𝑥̄ = 0.10328

c) What is the probability that the average battery lifetime of a random sample of 60 batteries is
less than 16.7 hours? (Explain, in 2 ways, why you can use the Normal calculation)

P(𝑥̄ < 16.7) = P(z < -2.90) = 0.0019 [or 0.0018 if exact z-score is used]
First, because we were told that the population distribution is Normal, that means that the
distribution of 𝑥̅ is Normal. Second, because the sample size is at least 30, according to
the Central Limit Theorem the distribution of 𝑥̅ follows approximately a Normal
distribution if the sample is large enough (at least 30). Usually only one of these is met,
and we only need one of these conditions to be met, but in this case both were met.

2) Suppose that 47% of all adult women think they do not get enough time for themselves. An opinion
poll interviews 1025 randomly chosen women and records the sample proportion, 𝑝̂ ,who feel they don’t
get enough time for themselves.

a) What is the mean of the sampling distribution of 𝑝̂ ?

𝜇𝑝̂ = 0.47

b) What is the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of 𝑝̂ ?

𝜎𝑝̂ = 0.01559

c) Check that the distribution of 𝑝̂ is approximately Normal.

The distribution of 𝑝̂ follows a Normal distribution because both np and n(1 – p) are at
least 10.
np = 1025(.47) = 482 >= 10, n(1 – p) = 1025(.53) = 543 >= 10

d) Find the probability that 𝑝̂ takes on a value between 0.45 and 0.50.

P(0.45 < 𝑝̂ < 0.50) = P(-1.28 < z < 1.92) = 0.9726 – 0.1003 = 0.8723
[0.8731 if unrounded z-scores are used]