STA2204

Exercise 3 (Chapter 3)

1. An importer has ordered a large consignment of tomatoes. When it arrives he examines a

randomly chosen sample of 50 boxes and finds that 12 contain at least one bad tomato.
Assuming that these boxes may be regarded as being a random sample from the boxes in
the consignment, obtain an approximate 99% confidence interval for the proportion of
boxes containing at least one bad tomato, giving your confidence limits correct to three
decimal places. (0.084, 0.396)

2. A random sample of 1000 voters are interviewed, of whom 349 state that they support the
Conservative party. Determine a 98% symmetric confidence interval for the proportion
of Conservative supporters in the population. (0.314, 0.384)

3. A pilot survey reveals that about 1% of the population have a particular physical
characteristic. Approximately how large would the main survey have to be in order to be
99% confident of obtaining an estimate of this proportion that is correct to within 0.1%?
(n = 65644)

4. A coin which is possibly biased is thrown 400 times. The number of heads obtained is
217. Find a 90% confidence interval for the probability of obtaining a head.
(0.5015, 0.5835)

5. A men’s necktie manufacturer wants to determine what proportion of neckties purchased

for wear by men were actually purchased by women. How large a sample will the
manufacturer need to be at least 98% confident that the sample proportion will be within
0.06 of the population proportion? (n = 376)

6. In a random sample of 500 high-fashion women’s dresses selected from the inventory of
a large retailer, 95 dresses were determine to be out of fashion and must therefore be sold
at reduced prices. Construct a 99 percent confidence interval for the corresponding
population proportion. (0.145, 0.235)

7. You want to have 90% confidence of estimating the proportion of office workers who
respond to email within an hour to within 0.05. Because you have not previously
undertaken such a study, there is no information available from past data. Determine the
sample size needed. (271)

STA2204.tut3