A real estate company is analyzing the selling prices of residential homes in a given
community. 140 homes that have been sold in the past month are randomly selected and
their selling prices are recorded. The statistician working on the project has stated that
in order to perform various statistical tests, the data must be distributed according to a
normal distribution. In order to determine whether the selling prices of homes included
in the random sample are normally distributed, the statistician divides the data into 6
classes of equal size and records the number of observations in each class. She then
performs a chi-square goodness-of-fit test for normal distribution. The results are
summarized in the following table.
What is the appropriate null hypothesis?
A. H0: The residential home selling prices are distributed according to a normal
distribution.
B. H0: The residential home selling prices are not distributed according to a normal
distribution.
C. H0: The distribution of residential home selling prices is either right or left skewed.
D. H0: The distribution of the residential home selling prices is symmetric.
E. None of these is correct.
The simple linear regression (least squares method) minimizes: