Question
According to an almanac,
of adult smokers started smoking before turning 18 years old.
(a) Compute the mean and standard deviation of the random variable
, the number of smokers who started before 18 in 300 trials of the probability experiment.
(b) Interpret the mean.
© Would it be unusual to observe 240 smokers who started smoking before turning 18 years old in a random sample of 300 adult smokers? Why?
(a)
(a) Compute the mean and standard deviation of the random variable
(b) Interpret the mean.
© Would it be unusual to observe 240 smokers who started smoking before turning 18 years old in a random sample of 300 adult smokers? Why?
(a)
Ask by Jimenez Logan. in the United States
Nov 23,2024
Upstudy AI Solution
Tutor-Verified Answer
Answer
(a)
(b) The mean of 180 represents the average number of smokers who started smoking before turning 18 years old in 300 trials.
© It would be unusual to observe 240 smokers who started smoking before turning 18 years old in a random sample of 300 adult smokers.
(b) The mean of 180 represents the average number of smokers who started smoking before turning 18 years old in 300 trials.
© It would be unusual to observe 240 smokers who started smoking before turning 18 years old in a random sample of 300 adult smokers.
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To solve the problem:
(a) The random variable
can be modeled as a binomial distribution since we have a fixed number of trials (300 smokers), and each smoker has two possible outcomes (started smoking before 18 or not). The mean
and the standard deviation
for a binomial distribution are given by:
Where
and
.
Calculating the mean:
Calculating the standard deviation:
So, the answers are:
(b) The mean of 180 smokers indicates that, on average, in a random sample of 300 adult smokers, we expect about 180 of them to have started smoking before the age of 18. This gives us a benchmark to understand typical smoking behavior in this population.
© To determine if observing 240 smokers who started smoking before the age of 18 is unusual, we calculate how many standard deviations away from the mean this observation is.
Find the z-score:
A z-score of 7.06 is extraordinarily high. In the context of a normal distribution, a z-score beyond 3 is generally considered unusual. Therefore, observing 240 smokers who started before age 18 would indeed be highly unusual in a sample of 300 adult smokers because it is far from the expected average and lies in the tail of the distribution.