A factory produces sausage rolls of length 10 cm. The production manager wishes to take a random sample of sausage rolls produced by a particular machine for quality control.
- (a)
State what it means for a sample to be random in this context.
- (b)
The lengths, cm, of a random sample of 60 sausage rolls are summarized as follows.
Suggest with a reason why, in this context, the given data is summarised in terms of rather than .
- (c)
Calculate unbiased estimates of the population mean and variance of the length of the sausage rolls.
- (d)
The production manager claims that the sausage rolls produced by the machine are shorter than 10 cm on average. Test, at the 10% level of significance, whether the manager's claim is valid. You should state your hypotheses and define any symbols you use.
- (e)
After comments from customers, the production manager wishes to test that the mean length of the sausage rolls produced by the factory is in fact 10 cm. Another random sample of 80 sausage rolls is taken.
It is now known that the population variance is 5 .
Given that the production manager concludes that there is no reason to reject the null hypothesis at the 10% level of significance, find the range of possible values of the sample mean used in calculating the test statistics.
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Worked solution
10(a)
1. State the definition of a simple random sample using the specific context of the question.
A sample is random if every sausage roll produced by the particular machine has an equal probability (or chance) of being selected for the sample.
Every sausage roll produced by the particular machine has an equal chance of being selected.
10(b)
1. State a valid practical or contextual reason for coding the data by subtracting 10.
The factory aims to produce sausage rolls of exactly 10 cm. Summarising the data as measures the deviation from this target length.
Consequently, since all values of are expected to be close to 10, will be close to 0. Working with these smaller numbers simplifies the manual calculation of the mean and variance and prevents the loss of significance that can occur when squaring and summing large values.
Using represents the deviation of each sausage roll from the target length of 10 cm. This produces smaller, more manageable numbers, making calculations easier and reducing the risk of precision errors.
10(c)
1. Calculate the unbiased estimate of the population mean
2. Calculate the unbiased estimate of the population variance
Mean cm, Variance cm (both to 3 s.f.)
10(d)
1. State the null and alternative hypotheses, and define the symbol used.
Let be the population mean length, in cm, of the sausage rolls produced by the machine.
2. Identify the unbiased estimates from part (c) and define the test statistic.
From part (c), the unbiased estimates are and .
Since is large, by the Central Limit Theorem, the sample mean is approximately normally distributed. Under , the test statistic is:
3. Calculate the $p$-value.
Using a graphing calculator, the -value for this 1-tail test is:
4. Compare the $p$-value with the level of significance and state the conclusion in context.
Since the -value of , we do not reject .
There is insufficient evidence at the level of significance to conclude that the sausage rolls produced by the machine are shorter than 10 cm on average. Hence, the manager's claim is not valid.
Do not reject . There is insufficient evidence at the level of significance to conclude that the sausage rolls are shorter than on average. Hence, the manager's claim is not valid.
10(e)
1. Formulate the null and alternative hypotheses and determine the critical values for a 2-tail test.
Let be the population mean length of the sausage rolls.
Level of significance,
Since this is a two-tailed test, the rejection region is split into two tails. The critical values from the standard normal distribution are .
2. Set up the standardisation formula for the test statistic.
Since the population variance is known and is large, by the Central Limit Theorem, the sample mean follows a normal distribution under :
The test statistic is given by:
3. Formulate the inequality for the non-rejection region and solve for the sample mean.
For not to be rejected, the test statistic must fall within the non-rejection (acceptance) region:
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