SET 1

PART I: MULTIPLE CHOICE

This scenario applies to Questions 1 and 2: A study was done to compare the lung
capacity of coal miners to the lung capacity of farm workers. The researcher studied 200
workers of each type. Other factors that might affect lung capacity are smoking habits
and exercise habits. The smoking habits of the two worker types are similar, but the coal
miners generally exercise less than the farm workers.

Question 1. Which of the following is the explanatory variable in this study?

a. Exercise
b. Lung capacity
c. Smoking or not
d. Occupation

Question 2. Which of the following is a confounding variable in this study?

a. Exercise
b. Lung capacity
c. Smoking or not
d. Occupation

Question 3. A magazine printed a survey in its monthly issue and asked readers to fill it
out and send it in. Over 1000 readers did so. This type of sample is called
a. a cluster sample.
b. a self-selected sample.
c. a stratified sample.
d. a simple random sample.

Question 4. Which of the following would be most likely to produce selection bias in a
survey?
a. Using questions with biased wording.
b. Only receiving responses from half of the people in the sample.
c. Conducting interviews by telephone instead of in person.
d. Using a random sample of students at a university to estimate the proportion of
people who think the legal drinking age should be lowered.

Question 5. Which one of the following variables is not categorical?

a. Age of a person.
b. Gender of a person: male or female.
c. Choice on a test item: true or false.
d. Marital status of a person (single, married, divorced, other)

Question 6. Which one of these statistics is unaffected by outliers?

a. Mean
b. Interquartile range
c. Standard deviation
d. Range

Question 7. A list of 5 pulse rates is: 70, 64, 80, 74, 92. What is the median for this list?
a. 74 b. 76 c. 77 d. 80

Question 8. Which of the following would indicate that a dataset is not bell-shaped?
 a. The range is equal to 5 standard deviations.
b. The range is larger than the interquartile range.
c. The mean is much smaller than the median.
d. There are no outliers.

Question 9. A chi-square test of the relationship between personal perception of

emotional health and marital status led to rejection of the null hypothesis, indicating
that there is a relationship between these two variables. One conclusion that can be
drawn is:
a. Marriage leads to better emotional health.
b. Better emotional health leads to marriage.
c. The more emotionally healthy someone is, the more likely they are to be married.
d. There are likely to be confounding variables related to both emotional
health and marital status.

Question 10. Pick the choice that best completes the following sentence. If a relationship
between two variables is called statistically significant, it means the investigators
think the variables are
a. related in the population represented by the sample.
b. not related in the population represented by the sample.
c. related in the sample due to chance alone.
d. very important.

PART 2: PROBLEM

Given the data set 

62 , 65 , 68 , 70 , 72 , 74 , 76 , 78 , 80 , 82 , 96 , 101, 

find 

a) the median, 

b) the first quartile, 

c) the third quartile, 

c) the interquartile range (IQR).

Answers:

+ median = 75 

+ first quartile = 69 

+ third quartile = 81 

+ interquartile range = 81 - 69 = 12