Chapter 2, Problem 1TP

It was stated in this chapter that the days of charming and primitive hand-drawn graphs are well behind us, and technology now provides us with powerful tools for generating a wide variety of different graphs. This project therefore serves as a good preparation for professional presentations that will be inevitably made in the future.

The complete data sets in Appendix B can be downloaded from www.TriolaStats.com. Statdisk already includes the data sets. They can be opened by statistical software packages, such as Statdisk, Minitab, Excel, SPSS, and JMP. Use a statistical software package to open Data Set 4 “Births.” Use this software with the methods of this chapter to explore and compare the birth weights of the girls and the birth weights of the boys. (Because the units are grams, they are actually measures of mass instead of weight.)

• Obtain a printed copy of the two histograms.

• Describe the natures of the two distributions (uniform, normal, skewed left, skewed right), and identify possible outliers.

• Write a brief description of your results.

Hint: The genders are coded as 1 for male and 0 for female, so sort (arrange in order) all of the rows using the gender column as the basis for sorting. Then the rows for boys can be separated from the rows for girls by using the copy/paste and cut functions of the software.