BQA1014 Quantitative Analysis Models for Business TRI 2 2022/2023

Tutorial 3A: Estimations

1. A process producing bricks is known to yield output whose weights are normally
distributed with a standard deviation of 0.12lb. A random sample of 40 bricks
from a day's output had a mean weight of 4.07lb.

(i) Find a 99% confidence interval for the mean weight of all bricks produced
on that day.
(ii) Estimate the smallest sample size required if the error in estimating the
population mean weight of all bricks is to be within  0.03lb with 95%
confidence.

2. A house cleaning service claims that they can clean a four bedroom house in less
than 2 hours. A sample of n = 16 houses is taken and the sample mean is found to
be 1.97 hours and the sample standard deviation is found to be 0.1 hours.
Construct a 95% confidence interval for the population mean of cleaning times.

3. The length (in millimetres) of a batch of 9 screws was selected at random from a
large consignment and found to have the following information.

8.02 8.00 8.01 8.01 7.99 8.00 7.99 8.03 8.01

Construct a 95% confidence interval to estimate the true average length of the
screws for the whole consignment.

4. A manager of a factory that manufactures a component of a particular machine

wants to assess the proportion of the defective items form the production floor. He
has selected a random sample of 300 items and finds that 45 of them are
defective.
(i) Calculate the 95% confidence interval for the proportion of defective
items.
(ii) Estimate the sample size needed by the manager if he wants to have the
margin error within 2%, with 95% confidence.

5. A quality characteristic of interest for a tea-bag-filling process is the weight of the

tea in the individual bags. If the bags are under filled , two problems arise. First,
customers may not be able to brew the tea to be as strong as they wish. Second,
the company may be in violation of the truth-in-labeling laws. Suppose that the
label weight on the package indicates that, on average, there are 5.5 grams of tea
in a bag. On the other hand, if the average amount of tea in a bag exceeds the
label weight, the company is giving away product. Below are weights in grams of
a sample of 21 tea bags produced in the last hour by a single machine.

5.65 5.52 5.33 5.44 5.54 5.29 5.36

5.59 5.35 5.51 5.50 5.30 5.48 5.57

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BQA1014 Quantitative Analysis Models for Business TRI 2 2022/2023

5.42 5.57 5.50 5.47 5.48 5.60 5.44

(i) Construct a 95% confidence interval of the population mean weight of the
tea bags. Is it reasonable to conclude that the population mean is 5.5
grams?
(ii) Construct a 90% confidence interval of the population proportion for
weights less than 5.5 grams as specified on the label of the package.
(iii) What sample size is needed if the company wants to be 99% confident of
being correct to within 10% of the population proportion for weights less
than 5.5 grams as specified on the label of the package?