1.5 Suppose you believe that, in general, graduates who havemajored in your subject are offered higher salaries upon graduatingthan are graduates of other programs. Describe a statisticalexperiment that could help test your belief.

1.6 You are shown a coin that its owner says is fair in thesense that it will produce the same number of
heads and tails when flipped a very large number of times.

a.Describe an experiment to test this claim.

b. What is the population in your experiment?

c. What is the sample?

d. What is the parameter?
e. What is the statistic?

f. Describe briefly how statistical inference can be used totest the claim.

1.7 Suppose that in Exercise

1.6 you decide to flip the coin 100 times.

a.What conclusion would you be likely to draw if you observed 95heads?
b. What conclusion would you be likely to draw if you observed 55heads?
c.Do you believe that, if you flip a perfectly fair coin 100 times,you will always observe exactly 50 heads? If you answered “no,”then what numbers do you think are possible? If you answered “yes,”how many heads would you observe if you flipped the coin twice? Tryflipping a coin twice and repeating this experiment 10 times andreport the results.

1.8 Xr01-08 The owner of a large fleet of taxis is trying toestimate his costs for next year’s operations. One major cost isfuel purchase. To estimate fuel purchase, the owner needs to knowthe total distance his taxis will travel next year, the cost of agallon of fuel, and the fuel mileage of his taxis. The owner hasbeen provided with the first two figures (distance estimate andcost of a gallon of fuel). However, because of the high cost ofgasoline, the owner has recently converted his taxis to operate onpropane. He has measured and recorded the propane mileage (in milesper gallon) for 50 taxis.

a.What is the population of interest?
b. What is the parameter the owner needs?

c. What is the sample?
d. What is the statistic?

e. Describe briefly how the statistic will produce the kind ofinformation the owner wants.