6 A supermarket buys pears from a local supplier. The supermarket requires the mean weight of the pears to be at least 175 grams. William, the fresh-produce manager at the supermarket, suspects that the latest batch of pears delivered does not meet this requirement.
- William weighs a random sample of 6 pears, obtaining the following weights, in grams.
$$\begin{array} { l l l l l l }
160.6 & 155.4 & 181.3 & 176.2 & 162.3 & 172.8
\end{array}$$
Previous batches of pears have had weights that could be modelled by a normal distribution with standard deviation 9.4 grams. Assuming that this still applies, show that a hypothesis test at the \(5 \%\) level of significance supports William's suspicion.
(7 marks) - William then weighs a random sample of 20 pears. The mean of this sample is 169.4 grams and \(s = 11.2\) grams, where \(s ^ { 2 }\) is an unbiased estimate of the population variance.
Assuming that the population from which this sample is taken has a normal distribution but with unknown standard deviation, test William's suspicion at the \(\mathbf { 1 \% }\) level of significance.
- Give a reason why the probability of a Type I error occurring was smaller when conducting the test in part (b) than when conducting the test in part (a).