The effective life of a component used in a jet-turbine aircraft engine is a random variable with mean 5000 hours and standard deviation 40 hours. The distribution of effective life is fairly close to a normal distribution. The engine manufacturer introduces an improvement into the manufacturing process for this component that increases the mean life to 5050 hours and decreases the standard deviation to 30 hours. Suppose that a random sample of n1 =16 components is selected from the “old” process and a random sample n2 =25 components is selected from the “improved” process. a. What is the probability that the difference in the two sample means x̄1 - x̄2 is at least 25 hours? Assume that the old and improved processes can be regarded as independent populations. b. Plot the density curve.

Definition Definition Measure of central tendency that is the average of a given data set. The mean value is evaluated as the quotient of the sum of all observations by the sample size. The mean, in contrast to a median, is affected by extreme values. Very large or very small values can distract the mean from the center of the data. Arithmetic mean: The most common type of mean is the arithmetic mean. It is evaluated using the formula: μ = 1 N ∑ i = 1 N x i Other types of means are the geometric mean, logarithmic mean, and harmonic mean. Geometric mean: The nth root of the product of n observations from a data set is defined as the geometric mean of the set: G = x 1 x 2 ... x n n Logarithmic mean: The difference of the natural logarithms of the two numbers, divided by the difference between the numbers is the logarithmic mean of the two numbers. The logarithmic mean is used particularly in heat transfer and mass transfer. ln x 2 − ln x 1 x 2 − x 1 Harmonic mean: The inverse of the arithmetic mean of the inverses of all the numbers in a data set is the harmonic mean of the data. 1 1 x 1 + 1 x 2 + ...