A football coach claims that players can increase their strength by taking a certain supplement. To test the theory, the coach randomly selects 9 athletes and gives them a strength test using a bench press. The results are listed below. Thirty days later, after regular training using the supplement, they are tested again. The new results are listed below. Test the claim that the supplement is effective in increasing the athletes' strength. Use a = 0.05. Assume that the distribution is normally distributed. ATHELETE 1 3 4 15 6 7 9 BEFORE 215 240 188 212 275 260 225 200 185 AFTER 225 245 188 210 282 275 230 195 190

Q: q

A:

Continuous Probability Distributions

Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.

Normal Distribution

Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!