Statistics 431, Fall 2007 Practice Midterm Exam 1

Practice Midterm Exam

Instructions Open notes (no textbooks). Calculators may be used for numerical compu-
tations. No laptops are allowed. On the actual exam you will be asked to write your answers
on the test pages along with your work (space and additional pages, if necessary, will be
allowed for this). When performing hypothesis tests verify the assumptions, justify use of
a particular test, clearly state null and alternative hypothesis, indicate critical value or a
P -value. Normal, t and F tables will be provided.

Time = 80 minutes.

Topics Midterm will cover all the topics discussed up to and including lecture 10 (Chapter
10).

1. Box, Hunter and Hunter (1978) report on an experiment studying the amount of shoe
wear. Two materials A and B were randomly assigned to the left and right shoes of
10 boys. Summary statistics for the amount of wear for two material are presented in
the following table (the last column shows the estimated standard deviation for the
difference between wear of materials A and B for the same boy).

x̄A sA x̄B sB sA−B

10.63 2.451326 11.04 2.518465 0.3871549

Is there any difference how materials wear out? You can assume that all the populations
in question are normally distributed.

2. Newly hatched chicks were randomly allocated into 3 groups, and each group was given
a different feed supplement. Their weights in grams after six weeks are given along
with feed types (data differ from the actual data in an article from Biometrika, v. 35,
no. 214, 1948). Data are given in the following table.

sunflower meatmeal soybean

339 315 230
296 288 287
320 261
250

Is there any difference between feed supplements and which feed supplements are dif-
ferent?

3. (This is problem 8.76 from Devore, 7th edition). An article in the Nov. 11, 2005, issue
of the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported that researchers making random purchases at
California Wal-Mart stores found scanners coming up with the wrong price 8.3% of the
time. Suppose this was based on 200 purchases. The National Institute for Standards
and Technology says that in the long run at most two out of every 100 items should
have incorrectly scanned prices.
Statistics 431, Fall 2007 Practice Midterm Exam 2

(a) Develop a test procedure with a significance level of (approximately) .05, and then
carry out the test to decide whether the NIST benchmark is not satisfied.
(b) For the test procedure you employed in (a), what is the probability of deciding
that the NIST benchmark has been satisfied when in fact the mistake rate is 5%?

4. NIST maintains the national standard for mass in the form of the prototype kilogram.
A company wants to compare its two 1-kilogram weights against the NIST standard.
For each weight 5 measurements are done against the NIST standard. The data are
given in the following table (data are fictious, measurements are done in grams and
1000 grams were subtracted from each measurement).

Weight #1 Weight #2
-0.0006091499 0.0006697736
0.0007821303 0.0007585898
0.0004691769 0.0002240764
0.0005425203 -0.0005103292
-0.0006033328 0.0001027571

(a) Is there evidence that measurement procedure for weight #2 was done less accu-
rately than for weight #1?
(b) Is there difference between weights?

5. A pharmaceutical company is producing tablets that are supposed to weigh 1 gram.

Deviation of more than 1% is unacceptable. A quality control engineer takes a random
sample of 125 tablets and measures their weight using high-precision weights. Results
of his measurements are

x̄ = 1.002942
s = 0.002247081

(a) What is the 95% confidence interval for the mean tablet weight?
(b) What should be done to have a 99% confidence interval twice narrower than the
interval computed above (make the best possible estimate)?
(c) What is the fraction of tablets produced by the company has weight deviating by
more than 1% from 1 gram (make the best possible estimate, state assumptions)?
(d) Assume, that tablets are produced in batches of 10000. We can either use high-
precision weights on the production line to check every tablet’s weight and discard
it if it does not conform to the standard stated above and it costs 1 cent to do the
test for each tablet, or we can take a sample of 100 tablets from the batch and
if we find one non-conforming tablet, the whole batch is discarded. Production
of one tablet costs 10 cents and checking 100 tablets from the batch costs 5
dollars. Which strategy is cheaper? Make the best possible estimate, state your
assumptions.