Question 1
Research Question: Do community forums on ecologically sustainable development increase community awareness of the need for local council planning in regard to water resource management?
In order to raise community awareness, a local council held a series of community forums on ecologically sustainable development. At the end of these forums participants were encouraged to develop goals and actions for their local area, and were also asked to complete a questionnaire rating the following sustainability issues in order of importance with regard to local council planning:
- Agriculture
- Energy use
- Environmental protection
- Fisheries ecosystem management
- Land use planning
- Water resource management
The forums were held in a local council area which includes a section of the Cooks River. The Cooks River starts in Bankstown and flows 23 kilometres east and south east into Botany Bay. One part of the forum addressed the significant decline in water quality due to the extreme degradation of the Cooks River catchment area. Most of the natural vegetation in the catchment area has been cleared and the area has been subjected to large-scale dumping of industrial and domestic waste including sewage, and stormwater pollution.
120 randomly selected participants from the forums were selected. 42 of these participants had rated water resource management as the most important issue. A second random sample was selected from local residents who had not attended these community forums. Of these 150 residents, 35 rated water resource management as the most important issue. Carry out an appropriate hypothesis test to address the research question. (You do not need to provide a confidence interval in your conclusion.) There is some extra space for the conclusion to this question at the top of the next page if required.
Question 2
Research Question: On 30th April, 2012, were ozone levels in the north or England lower, on average, than ozone levels in the south of England?
Ozone (O3) acts as a protective layer high above the earth, but it can be harmful to breathe. At ground level it can trigger a variety of health problems including a reduction in lung function. A random sample of monitoring sites in England was selected from the UK-AIR database and the ozone level for April 30th 2012 was recorded at each site. Ozone levels were measured in micrograms per cubic metre of air (ug/m3). 34 of these monitoring sites were in northern regions of England (the Midlands, North East, North West and Merseyside, Yorkshire and Humberside) and the other 23 monitoring sites were either in London or in other regions in the south of England (Greater London, South East and South West). The following Minitab output was obtained using these ozone levels. You may assume that these ozone levels were drawn from normal distributions. There are some values in the output below the graphical displays which have been omitted and marked with a *. You will need to reconstruct these values to complete this question.
b. Calculate the test statistic and the df:
c. Find the p-value:
d. Write a conclusion, addressing the research question. Your conclusion should include an interpretation of the 95% confidence bound which is given in the above output