Worked solution
Assess Alice’s claim about mean mass
Suppose the mass of a man in Singapore is assumed to be normally distributed with mean 75 kg and variance . 100 men are randomly selected from the population and their sample mean mass is 77.2 kg. Alice claims that the population mean mass is actually more than 75 kg. Conduct a hypothesis test at the 5% level of significance.
CJC · Lecture · Opening scenario (unnumbered)
Define the model and hypotheses
Let be a randomly selected man’s mass in kg and the population mean. Test against . Under , and . Normality and known variance make this sampling distribution exact; no CLT approximation is needed.
Calculate the observed upper-tail probability
The standard error is kg, not 80 or . Thus and . The source displays but retains the p-value from the unrounded input; keep full precision until the final result.
Compare with the preselected significance level
Reject if . Here , so reject : there is sufficient evidence at the 5% level that the population mean mass exceeds 75 kg. Under the null, repeated random samples of 100 have probability about 0.00695 of a mean at least 77.2 kg. This is not a probability that the null is true.
Check the same decision using a critical boundary
The source’s calculator uses inverse normal with upper-tail area 0.05, mean 75 and standard deviation : . The source writes the critical region ; the observed 77.2 is inside it. Using the inclusive boundary convention gives the same decision; boundary equality has zero probability in this continuous model.
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Common mistakes
The hypothesised mean 75 and observed sample mean 77.2 play different roles. A small p-value does not prove the claim.
Solution notes
Original source scenario is unnumbered and recurs across the lecture; source number 0 is a stable internal identity, not a printed Example 0. Teacher hypotheses and completed probability calculation are integrated. Calculator artwork is not reproduced.