Assume that human body temperatures are normally distributed with a mean of 98.18°F and a standard deviation of 0.61°F. a. A hospital uses 100.6°F as the lowest temperature considered to be a fever. What percentage of normal and healthy persons would be considered to have a fever? Does this percentage suggest that a cutoff of 100.6°F is appropriate? The percentage of normal and healthy persons considered to have a fever is_______ b. Physicians want to select a minimum temperature for requiring further medical tests. What should that temperature be, if we want only 5.0% of healthy people to exceed it? (Such a result is a false positive, meaning that the test result is positive, but the subject is not really sick.) The minimum temperature for requiring further medical tests should be ___°F if we want only 5.0% of healthy people to exceed it.
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!
Assume that human body temperatures are
a. A hospital uses 100.6°F as the lowest temperature considered to be a fever. What percentage of normal and healthy persons would be considered to have a fever? Does this percentage suggest that a cutoff of 100.6°F is appropriate? The percentage of normal and healthy persons considered to have a fever is_______
b. Physicians want to select a minimum temperature for requiring further medical tests. What should that temperature be, if we want only 5.0% of healthy people to exceed it? (Such a result is a false positive, meaning that the test result is positive, but the subject is not really sick.) The minimum temperature for requiring further medical tests should be ___°F if we want only 5.0% of healthy people to exceed it.
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