You’ll often hear the expression, "this is accurate to plus or minus two standard deviations." assuming that the population (or sample) has a normal distribution, what percentage of the population (or sample) is included in the quantity, "plus or minus two standard deviations"?

Farmers know that driving heavy equipment on wet soil compresses the soil and injures future crops. here are data on the "penetrability" of the same type of soil at two levels of compression. penetrability is a measure of how much resistance plant roots will meet when they try to grow through the soil. compressed soil 2.85 2.66 3 2.82 2.76 2.81 2.78 3.08 2.94 2.86 3.08 2.82 2.78 2.98 3.00 2.78 2.96 2.90 3.18 3.16 intermediate soil 3.17 3.37 3.1 3.40 3.38 3.14 3.18 3.26 2.96 3.02 3.54 3.36 3.18 3.12 3.86 2.92 3.46 3.44 3.62 4.26 use the data, omitting the high outlier, to give a 95% confidence interval for the decrease in penetrability of compressed soil relative to intermediate soil. compute degrees of freedom using the conservative method. interval: to