The U. S. Census Bureau conducts a study to determine the time needed to complete the short form. The Bureau surveys 200 people. The sample mean is 8.2 minutes. There is a known standard deviation of 2.2 minutes. The population distribution is assumed to be normal. Construct a 90% confidence interval for the population mean time to complete the forms. State the confidence interval, sketch the graph, and calculate the error bound.

So on this case the 90% confidence interval would be given by (6.86;9.54)    And the error is given by:

Step-by-step explanation:

Previous concepts

A confidence interval is "a range of values that’s likely to include a population value with a certain degree of confidence. It is often expressed a % whereby a population means lies between an upper and lower interval".

The margin of error is the range of values below and above the sample statistic in a confidence interval.

Normal distribution, is a "probability distribution that is symmetric about the mean, showing that data near the mean are more frequent in occurrence than data far from the mean".

represent the sample mean for the sample  

population mean (variable of interest)

represent the population standard deviation

n represent the sample size  

Solution to the problem

The confidence interval for the mean is given by the following formula:

  (1)

Since the Confidence is 0.90 or 90%, the value of and , and we can use excel, a calculator or a table to find the critical value. The excel command would be: "=-NORM.INV(0.005,0,1)".And we see that

Now we have everything in order to replace into formula (1):

So on this case the 90% confidence interval would be given by (6.86;9.54)    And the error is given by: