Edexcel S4 — Question 4

Exam BoardEdexcel
ModuleS4 (Statistics 4)
TopicHypothesis test of a normal distribution

4. Gill, a member of the accounts department in a large company, is studying the expenses claims of company employees. She assumes that the claims, in \(\pounds\), follow a normal distribution with mean \(\mu\) and variance \(\sigma ^ { 2 }\). As a first stage in her investigation she took the following random sample of 10 claims. $$30.85,99.75,142.73,223.16,75.43,28.57,53.90,81.43,68.62,43.45 .$$
  1. Find a 95\% confidence interval for \(\mu\). The chief accountant would like a \(95 \%\) confidence interval where the difference between the upper confidence limit and the lower confidence limit is less than 20 .
  2. Show that \(\frac { \sigma ^ { 2 } } { n } < 26.03\) (to 2 decimal places), where \(n\) is the size of the sample required to achieve this. Gill decides to use her original sample of 10 to obtain a value for \(\sigma ^ { 2 }\) so that the chance of her value being an underestimate is 0.01 .
  3. Find such a value for \(\sigma ^ { 2 }\).
  4. Use this value for \(\sigma ^ { 2 }\) to estimate the size of sample the chief accountant requires.