Controversial Song The song “Baby It’s Cold Outside” generated much controversy because of its lyrics and tone. CBS New York conducted a survey by asking viewers to use the Internet to respond to a question asking whether that song was really too offensive to play. Among 1043 Internet users who chose to respond, 986 said that the song was not too offensive, and 57 of the respondents said that the song was too offensive.


a. Construct a 95% confidence interval estimate of the proportion of the population having the belief that the song is not too offensive.

E-Cigarettes A New York Times article reported that a survey conducted in 2014 included 36,000 adults, with 3.7% of them being regular users of e-cigarettes. Because e-cigarette use is relatively new, there is a need to obtain today’s usage rate. How many adults must be surveyed now if we want a confidence level of 95% and a margin of error of 1.5 percentage points?

a. Assume that nothing is known about the rate of e-cigarette usage among adults.

Voting Survey In a survey of 1002 people, 70% said that they voted in a recent presidential election (based on data from ICR Research Group). Voting records show that 61% of eligible voters actually did vote.

a. Among the 1002 people surveyed, what is the actual number of people who said that they voted?

Airline Seating You are the operations manager for American Airlines and you are considering a higher fare level for passengers in aisle seats. You want to estimate the percentage of passengers who now prefer aisle seats. How many randomly selected air passengers must you survey? Assume that you want to be 95% confident that the sample percentage is within 2.5 percentage points of the true population percentage.

a. Assume that nothing is known about the percentage of passengers who prefer aisle seats.

Brain Volumes Use these measures of brain volumes from Data Set 12 “IQ and Brain Size” in Appendix B. Use the bootstrap method with 1000 bootstrap samples.

a. Use 1000 bootstrap samples to construct a 90% confidence interval estimate of the population mean.

Critical Thinking. In Exercises 17–28, use the data and confidence level to construct a confidence interval estimate of p, then address the given question.

Touch Therapy When she was 9 years of age, Emily Rosa did a science fair experiment in which she tested professional touch therapists to see if they could sense her energy field. She flipped a coin to select either her right hand or her left hand, and then she asked the therapists to identify the selected hand by placing their hand just under Emily’s hand without seeing it and without touching it. Among 280 trials, the touch therapists were correct 123 times (based on data in “A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch,” Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 279, No. 13).

a. Given that Emily used a coin toss to select either her right hand or her left hand, what proportion of correct responses would be expected if the touch therapists made random guesses?

Mean Pulse Rate of Males Data Set 1 “Body Data” in Appendix B includes pulse rates of 153 randomly selected adult males, and those pulse rates vary from a low of 40 bpm to a high of 104 bpm. Find the minimum sample size required to estimate the mean pulse rate of adult males. Assume that we want 99% confidence that the sample mean is within 2 bpm of the population mean.

a. Find the sample size using the range rule of thumb to estimate .