Discussion
A pharmaceutical company claims that its weight loss drug allows women to lose 8.5 lb after one month of treatment. If we want to conduct an experiment to determine if the patients are losing less weight than advertised, which of the following hypothesis should be used ?
Answer: B
The hypotheses are \(H_{0} : \mu = 8.5\), \(H_{a} : \mu \lt 8.5\).
The claim being challenged is the advertised mean loss of 8.5 lb, so it goes into the null hypothesis. The experiment is looking for evidence that patients lose less than advertised, so the alternative is one-sided to the left.
\(H_{a} : \mu \gt 8.5\) would test whether patients lose more than claimed, which is not the question. A two-sided alternative wastes power on the uninteresting direction. And \(H_{0} : \mu \gt 8.5\) against \(H_{a} : \mu \le 8.5\) puts the equality in the alternative, which is not how a null is set up: the null must contain the boundary value so the test statistic has a known distribution under it.
Post your comment
Please log in or register to post a comment.
Examination Categories
- SSC Exams
- Banking Exams
- Teaching Exams
- Civil Services Exams
- Railways Exams
- Engineering Recruitment Exams
- Defence Exams
- State Government Exams
- Police Exams
- Insurance Exams
- Nursing Exams
- Other Government Exams
- NRA CET
- PG Entrance Exams
- Campus Placement
- MBA Entrance Exams
- CUET and UG Entrance
- Judiciary Exams
- Regulatory Body Exams
- Software Development