How to decide if a t-test is one tailed or two tailed?

Look at the alternate hypothesis, if it says estimated sample mean is greater than or smaller
than a specified value then it is a one tailed t test.
For a test two be one tailed, alternative hypothesis should be,
Ha: > 45 or Ha: < 45
If alternate hypothesis says estimated sample mean is not equal to assumed mean, and then it
is two tailed t-test.
Eg: Ha: 45
Since our hypothesis is of () form we will consider it to be a twotailed test and hence we
will use two tailed values of t.
In two tailed test we will have the rejection area on both the sides of normal curve. That
means we will assume equality of the assumed mean with estimated means and test only if
the value same as assumed mean or not and we are not concerned whether estimated mean is
either greater or smaller than assumed mean.
In case of one tailed test we will be testing whether the estimated sample mean is greater than
or smaller than the assumed mean hence it will have rejection region on only greater or
smaller side of the normal distribution curve.
P value and hypothesis acceptance/rejection
The idea behind p value is that it depicts the probability of test results being beyond the
values abstained by us, whereas, alpha is the measure of acceptance level for these errors. So
we will reject the null hypothesis if the possibilities of values ranging beyond our estimates
are greater than our acceptance level.
Generally we will have significance level of 5%, that means = 0.05
The rule for acceptance or rejection of null hypothesis is that
If p value > ; then accept null hypothesis
If p value < ; then the reject null hypothesis
Since out test is two tailed test, we will consider two tailed p value from the analysis.
p value is 0.060, that means If p value> ; so accept null hypothesis