Suppose that the annual household income in a small Midwestern community is normally distributed with a mean of $55,000 and a standard deviation of $4,500. What is the probability that a randomly selected household will have an income between $50,000 and $65,000? What is the probability that a randomly selected household will have an income of more than $70,000? What minimum income does a household need to earn to be in the top 5% of incomes? What maximum income does a household need to earn to be in the bottom 40% of incomes?
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!
Suppose that the annual household income in a small Midwestern community is
- What is the
probability that a randomly selected household will have an income between $50,000 and $65,000? - What is the probability that a randomly selected household will have an income of more than $70,000?
- What minimum income does a household need to earn to be in the top 5% of incomes?
- What maximum income does a household need to earn to be in the bottom 40% of incomes?
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