AP® Statistics

2020 Practice Free-Response Questions

From Introduction to Statistical Investigations, AP Edition , by Nathan Tintle, Ruth Carver, Beth
Chance, George Cobb, Allan Rossman, Soma Roy, Todd Swanson, and Jill VanderStoep. ©2019 by
John Wiley & Sons Inc. HMH is Wiley's exclusive partner for college-level content used in high schools.

DIRECTIONS: Show all your work. Indicate clearly the methods you use, because you will be scored on
the correctness of your method as well as on the accuracy and completeness of your results and
explanations.

Question 1
Students in an AP Statistics class participated in an online memory game. All the students first played
the game at Level 1 (the lowest difficulty level), and then played the game again at Level 4 (a higher
level of difficulty). The graphs below display the distribution of student scores for the two difficulty
levels—Level 1 and Level 4.

a. Use the graphical display above to compare the distribution of student scores for the two difficulty
levels (Level 1 and Level 4) of the memory game.

The difference in scores (Level 4–Level 1) on the memory game was calculated for each student. The
graph below displays the distribution of the differences.
b. What added information does the graph above of the difference in scores (Level 4-Level 1) give
you about students’ scores on the two different levels of the game that was not apparent in the
first graphical display?

Question 2
The National Park Service is interested in determining whether placing predator cages over the
loggerhead turtle nests on Cape Lookout National Seashore will keep raccoons from stealing eggs
from the nests. Due to budget constraints, funding for the predator cages will only be approved if
the Park Service can provide convincing evidence that the predator cages increase the number of
turtles that successfully hatch.
The Park Service plans to collect data from the loggerhead turtle nests at Cape Lookout one
season, 35 of which will have a predator cage placed over them and 35 of which will not. A test of
significance will be conducted at a significance level of α = 0.05 for the following hypotheses:
H0: μC = μNC
Ha: μC > μNC,
where μC is the mean number of eggs that would successfully hatch per nest for all loggerhead
turtle nests on Cape Lookout with a cage and μNC is the mean number of eggs that would
successfully hatch per nest for all nests on Cape Lookout with no cage.
a. Describe what a Type I error would be in the context of the study, and also describe a
consequence of making this type of error.
b. Each season, the Park Service moves approximately half the turtle nests at Cape Lookout very
soon after they are laid because they are placed in locations that are vulnerable to extreme
high tides. The Park Service decides to collect data for their study by randomly selecting 35 of
the nests that were moved and placing a cage over them and comparing the hatching rate to
the rate for 35 randomly selected nests that were neither moved nor caged. This resulted in a
p-value of 0.0003 for the hypotheses stated above. If it was reasonable to conduct a test of
significance for the hypotheses stated above using the data collected, what would the p-
value of 0.0003 lead you to conclude?
c. Describe the primary flaw in the study described in part (b), and explain why it is a concern.

Question 3
A smartphone manufacturer is concerned about the proportion of defectives produced at a
certain plant that produces many smartphones every day. Historically, approximately 15% of
phones produced at this plant have been defective. As part of their quality assurance testing,
four smartphones are selected at random from a day’s production.
a. Let X represent the number of defective phones in the sample of four phones. Complete the
table below for the probability distribution of X, assuming the historic defective rate holds.

b. What is the expected number of defective phones in this sample?

c. What is the conditional probability that all four phones were defective, given that at least
two defectives were found in the sample?
d. Suppose that each day the phones are produced independently of all other days’ phones.
If a sample of size 4 is taken every weekday (five total samples), what is the probability
that there are no defective phones found in any of the five samples taken?

Question 4
The National Sleep Foundation conducts an annual survey to track sleep-related behavior of
U.S. adults. In their most recent survey, a random sample of 1,018 adults answered the question
“About how much actual sleep would you estimate you typically get on work nights or
weeknights?” The two-way table below summarizes the responses by whether they were less
than, equal to, or more than the recommended 7 to 9 hours of sleep and by the age group of
the respondent.

At the α = 0.05 significance level, do the data provide convincing statistical evidence that there
is an association between age group and typical weeknight sleep time for adults in the United
States? Explain your answer.

Question 5
In 2006, professional tennis introduced a challenge system in which a player can challenge
decisions on whether a tennis ball was correctly called "in" or "out" by an official. A video replay
then determines whether or not the call was correct (“upheld”) or incorrect (“reversed”). A
player wants to determine whether “in” calls or “out” calls are more likely to be reversed. The
table below shows the 2015 Women’s Singles challenges based on whether the tennis ball was
called “out” or “in” and whether the official’s call was reversed or upheld.
a. Calculate the proportion of all challenges in which the official’s call was reversed.
b. Use these data as a representative sample of all player challenges in professional tennis to
find a 95% confidence interval for the difference in the proportion of reversed calls when the
official calls the ball “out” and when the official calls the ball “in” (out–in). Be sure to also
provide an interpretation of this confidence interval. You may assume that all conditions for
inference were met.
c. Does the confidence interval from (b) provide convincing statistical evidence that there is a
difference in the proportion of reversed challenges between when the official calls the ball
“out” and when the official calls the ball “in”? Justify your answer.
d. Would your answer to (c) change if the confidence interval in (b) were a 90% confidence
interval rather than a 95% confidence interval? Explain how you are arriving at your answer.

Question 6
In a large manufacturing company every item produced is inspected for defects and will go
through a repair process if the defects are serious. Management wanted to investigate whether
items produced on Mondays are more likely to require repair than items produced on the midweek
day Wednesday. A random sample of 9 weeks from the past 5 years was selected, and the
number of items that required repair for the 9 weeks are shown in the table below.

A boxplot of the differences in number of items that required repairing on Monday and
Wednesday for the 9 sampled weeks is shown below.

a. Management wanted to test these hypotheses:

H0: μdifference = 0
Ha: μdifference > 0

where μdifference is the mean of the differences in the number of produced items that
required repair on Monday and on Wednesday for all weeks in the past 5 years.
Explain why performing a matched-pairs t-test may not be appropriate for this sample of
differences.
A different possible set of hypotheses for this investigation could be:
H0: p = 0.5
Ha: p > 0.5
where p is the proportion of all weeks in which Monday produces more items that require
repair than Wednesday.
Suppose we decide to test these hypotheses using the statistic X, the number of weeks of
the 9 sampled weeks in which more items required repair on Monday than Wednesday.
b. Assuming the null hypothesis (that Mondays and Wednesdays are equally likely to have the
most items which require repair) is true, what is the probability distribution for the statistic X?
c. Calculate the p-value and use this p-value to provide the conclusion of the test for a
significance level of α = 0.05.
A different possible set of hypotheses for this investigation is:
H0: The distributions of the numbers of items that require repair for Mondays and
Wednesday are the same.
Ha: The distribution of the numbers of items that require repair for Mondays is shifted
to the right of the distribution of the number of items that require repair on
Wednesdays.
To test these hypotheses using the signed rank test, we first order the absolute values of
the differences and then determine the ranks of the 9 values (1 = smallest, 9 = largest). Then
we return the original positive or negative sign. The statistic is the sum of the positive
ranks.
d. Calculate the statistic for the signed rank test by completing the signed rank of the
difference column in the table below and then adding up the positive ranks.

Sum of Positive Ranks = _______________

Under the assumption of the null hypothesis, that the distributions of the numbers of items
requiring repair for Mondays and Wednesday are the same, a simulation with 10,000 repetitions
was performed and the signed rank statistic was calculated for each repetition. The histogram
below shows the distribution of the simulated signed rank statistics.
e. Based on the value of the signed rank test statistic calculated in part (e) and the
distribution of the 10,000 simulated signed rank test statistics above, what should be the
conclusion for the manufacturing company in comparing the number of items requiring
repair on Mondays and Wednesdays?