Question

A student wanted to construct a 95% confidence interval for the mean age of students in her statistics class. She randomly selected nine students. Their mean age was 19.1 years with a sample standard deviation of 1.5 years. What is the 99% confidence interval for the population mean?
A. [0.44,3.80]
B. [14.23,23.98]
C. [17.42,20.78]
D. [17.48,20.72]

Answer 1

Answer:

$19.1-3.355\frac{1.5}{\sqrt{9}}=17.42$    

$19.1+3.355\frac{1.5}{\sqrt{9}}=20.78$    

And the best option would be:

C. [17.42,20.78]

Step-by-step explanation:

Previous concepts

A confidence interval is "a range of values that’s likely to include a population value with a certain degree of confidence. It is often expressed a % whereby a population means lies between an upper and lower interval".

The margin of error is the range of values below and above the sample statistic in a confidence interval.

Normal distribution, is a "probability distribution that is symmetric about the mean, showing that data near the mean are more frequent in occurrence than data far from the mean".

$\bar X=19.1$ represent the sample mean

$\mu$ population mean (variable of interest)

s=1.5 represent the sample standard deviation

n=9 represent the sample size  

Solution to the problem

The confidence interval for the mean is given by the following formula:

$\bar X \pm t_{\alpha/2}\frac{s}{\sqrt{n}}$   (1)

In order to calculate the critical value $t_{\alpha/2}$ we need to find first the degrees of freedom, given by:

$df=n-1=9-1=8$

Since the Confidence is 0.99 or 99%, the value of $\alpha=0.01$ and $\alpha/2 =0.005$, and we can use excel, a calculator or a table to find the critical value. The excel command would be: "=-T.INV(0.005,8)".And we see that $t_{\alpha/2}=$

Now we have everything in order to replace into formula (1):

$19.1-3.355\frac{1.5}{\sqrt{9}}=17.42$    

$19.1+3.355\frac{1.5}{\sqrt{9}}=20.78$    

And the best option would be:

C. [17.42,20.78]