Impact of cooking on air particles. A group of Harvard University School of Public Health researchers studied the impact of cooking on the size of indoor air particles (Environmental Science and Technology, September 1, 2000). The decay rate (measured as μ m/hour) for fine particles produced from oven cooking or toasting was recorded on six randomly selected days. These six measurements are shown in the table.
(a) Find and interpret a 95% confidence interval for the true average decay rate of fine particles produced from oven cooking or toasting.
(b) Explain what the phrase ‘‘95% confident'' implies in the interpretation of part a.
(c) What must be true about the distribution of the population of decay rates for the inference to be valid?
| Decay |
0.95 |
0.83 |
1.2 |
0.89 |
1.45 |
1.12 |