Too much cholesterol in the blood increases the risk of heart disease. Young women typically have lower levels of cholesterol than other groups. The cholesterol levels for women aged 20 to 34 are approximately normally distributed with a mean of 185.0 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl) and a standard deviation of 40/dl. What proportion of young women have a cholesterol level greater than 215.0 mg/dl?
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!
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