An ethanol railroad tariff is a fee charged for shipments of ethanol on public railroads. An agricultural association publishes tariff rates for railroad-car shipments of ethanol. Assuming that the standard deviation of such tariff rates is $1000, determine the probability that the mean tariff rate of 400 randomly selected railroad-car shipments of ethanol will be within $90 of the mean tariff rate of all railroad-car shipments of ethanol. Interpret your answer in terms of sampling error.
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
An ethanol railroad tariff is a fee charged for shipments of ethanol on public railroads. An agricultural association publishes tariff rates for railroad-car shipments of ethanol. Assuming that the standard deviation of such tariff rates is
$1000,
determine the probability that the mean tariff rate of
400
randomly selected railroad-car shipments of ethanol will be within
$90
of the mean tariff rate of all railroad-car shipments of ethanol. Interpret your answer in terms of sampling error.
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