customers spend more money, on average, than its male charge customers. They have collected random samples of 25
female customers and 22 male customers. On average, women charge customers spend $102.23 and men charge
customers spend $86.46. Some information is shown below.
Summary statistics for two samples
Sample standard deviations
Confidence interval for difference between means
Pooled standard deviation
56. (A) Use a t – value of 2.014 to calculate a 95% confidence interval for the difference between the average female
purchase and the average male purchase. Would you conclude that there is a significant difference between females and
males in this case? Explain.
(B) What are the degrees of freedom for the t-multiple in this calculation? Explain how you would calculate the degrees of
freedom in this case.
(C) What is the assumption in this case that allows you to use the pooled standard deviation for this confidence interval?
A marketing research consultant hired by Coca-Cola is interested in determining the proportion of customers who favor
Coke over other soft drinks. A random sample of 400 consumers was selected from the market under investigation and
showed that 53% favored Coca-Cola over other brands.
57. (A) Compute a 95% confidence interval for the true proportion of people who favor Coke. Do the results of this poll
convince you that a majority of people favors Coke?
(B) Suppose 2,000 (not 400) people were polled and 53% favored Coke. Would you now be convinced that a majority of
people favor Coke? Why might your answer be different than in (A)?
(C) How many people would have to be surveyed to be 95% confident that you can estimate the fraction of people who
favor Coca-Cola within 1%?
A large regional department store is evaluating the effectiveness of its credit card program, which costs it approximately
$1m per year to administer. The store believes that for the credit card program to be worthwhile, the administrative costs
should be no more than 10% of the total of the average annual account balances. Rather than reviewing each of the
15,000 individual accounts, the store’s analysts randomly selected a sample of 500 average annual balances from the
frame. The sample mean and sample standard deviation were $215.75 and $55.90, respectively.
58. (A) Construct a 95% confidence interval for the mean of the average annual credit account balances.
(B) Interpret the 95% confidence interval constructed in (A).
(C) Use the confidence interval constructed for (A) to help the store evaluate its criteria for whether or not the credit card
program is worthwhile.
59. You have been assigned to determine whether more people prefer Coke to Pepsi. Assume that roughly half the
population prefers Coke and half prefers Pepsi. How large a sample would you need to take to ensure that you could
estimate, with 95% confidence, the proportion of people preferring Coke within 3% of the actual value?
60. You are trying to estimate the average amount a family spends on food during a year. In the past the standard
deviation of the amount a family has spent on food during a year has been approximately $800. If you want to be 95%
sure that you estimated average family food expenditures within $50, how many families do you need to survey?