Park officials make predictions of times to the next eruption of a particular geyser, and collect data for the errors (minutes) in those predictions. the display from technology available below results from using the prediction errors to test the claim that the mean prediction error is equal to zero. comment on the accuracy of the predictions. use a 0.050.05 significance level. identify the null and alternative hypotheses, test statistic, p-value, and state the final conclusion that addresses the original claim.

irst, find the z score of a score of 80. this is given by the formula z = (x-u)/o, where x is the score, u is the mean, and o is the standard deviation. this gives

z = (80-78)/12 = 1/6 = .1667

now, find what percentile a z score of 1/6 correlates to in the normal distribution.

a z score of 1/6 = .1667 is equivalent to the 56.36th percentile of the distribution. so the probability a score is over this is 1-.5636 = .4364

the mean of a sample mean is equal to the original mean. however, the standard deviation of a sample mean is equal to the original standard deviation divided by the square root of n (sample size). so the new standard deviation is 12/sqrt(16) = 3.

the new z score is 80-78/3 = 2/3 = .667. this is equivalent to the 74.86th percentile. so the probability that the mean will be greater than this score is 1-.7486 = .2514.