Do women talk more? Conventional wisdom suggests that women are more talkative than men. One study designed to examine this stereotype collected data on the speech of 42 women and 37 men in the United States
(a) The mean number of words spoken per day by the women was 14,297 with a standard deviation of 6441. Use the 68-95-99.7 rule to describe this distribution.
(b) Do you think that applying the rule in this situation is reasonable? Explain your answer.
(c) The men averaged 14,060 words per day with a standard deviation of 9056. Answer the questions in parts (a) and (b) for the men.
(d) Do you think that the data support the conventional wisdom? Explain your answer. Note that in Section 6.1 we will learn formal statistical methods to answer this type of question.