The mean total cholesterol for a population of men between the ages of 20 and 29 is 180 micrograms per decilitre with a standard deviation of 37.4. A healthy total cholesterol level is less than 200, 200-240 is border line, and above 240 is dangerous. Assume the distribution is approximately Normal. For a randomly selected man from this group, what is the probability that his total cholesterol level is i. 200 or more? 11 Between 200 and 240?
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!
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