Engineers measure the melting point under carfully controlled conditions to find the estimate of the true mean melting point of a metal. The true standard deviation of all melting points for this metal is 3.2 degrees C. How many measurements will be needed to obtain a margin of error of 0.8 degrees C with 95% confidence? Round answer up to whole number.
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!
Engineers measure the melting point under carfully controlled conditions to find the estimate of the true mean melting point of a metal. The true standard deviation of all melting points for this metal is 3.2 degrees C. How many measurements will be needed to obtain a margin of error of 0.8 degrees C with 95% confidence? Round answer up to whole number.
Step by step
Solved in 2 steps with 2 images
