EXAMPLE 17 The 68–95–99.7 Rule Again

In Example 16, the population parameter, the proportion of adults who agreed with some statement, is . if we take SRSs of size 1500, the sample proportions follow the normal distribution with a mean of 0.6 and a standard deviation of 0.0126. The “95” part of the 68–95–99.7 rule from Section 5.9 (page 216) says that 95% of all samples give a within 2 standard deviations of the truth about the population. So in this example, 95% of all samples have within of 0.60, that is, between 0. 57 and 0.63 (rounded to two decimal places). Figure 7.10 illustrates this use of the 68–95–99.7 rule.

Algebra Review Appendix

Rounding Numbers

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Figure 7.10: Figure 7.10 The sampling distribution of for Example 16. By the 68–95–99.7 rule, 95% of all samples have a sample proportion within 0.0252 of the true population proportion .