You are a general manager of a sports franchise who is evaluating a player on your team. This player has been in the league for 10 years and has scored an average (mean) of 20 points, with a standard deviation of 7. You can assume this data is normally distributed. Using this data, answer the following questions: What is the probability that this player will score 20 points next year? You keep this player and then they do score at least 20 points the f
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!
- You are a general manager of a sports franchise who is evaluating a player on your team. This player has been in the league for 10 years and has scored an average (mean) of 20 points, with a standard deviation of 7. You can assume this data is
normally distributed. Using this data, answer the following questions:- What is the
probability that this player will score 20 points next year? - You keep this player and then they do score at least 20 points the following year. The sports media are calling this an exceptional ("career") year. Do you agree with this assessment? Why or why not?
- What is the probability that this player will score at least 50 points in a given year?
- You keep this player and they do score 50 points the following year. The sports media are calling this an exceptional ("career") year. Do you agree with this assessment? Why or why not?
- What is the
- Assume that your tests scores on college exams have an average (mean) of 70 points, a standard deviation of 10, and are normally distributed. Your decide that for your next exam you are going to attempt a trick for studying which is said to dramatically improve grades.
- How could you describe what "dramatically improve" really means?
- What would you have to score in order to be convinced that the trick worked?
- Assume you score an 80 on this exam. Do you think the trick worked? Why or why not?
- Assume you score a 30 on this exam. Do you think the trick worked? Why or why not?
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