Suppose the area that can be painted using a single can of spray paint is slightly variable and follows a nearly normal distribution with a mean of 25 square feet and a standard deviation of 3 square feet.

(a) What is the probability that the area covered by a can of spray paint is more than 27 square feet?
(b) Suppose you want to spray paint an area of 540 square feet using 20 cans of spray paint. On average, how many square feet must each can be able to cover to spray paint all 540 square feet?
(c) What is the probability that you can cover a 540 square feet area using 20 cans of spray paint?
(d) If the area covered by a can of spray paint had a slightly skewed distribution, could you still calculate the probabilities in parts (a) and (c) using the normal distribution?

Step-by-step explanation:

Hello!

You have the variable

X: Area that can be painted with a can of spray paint (feet²)

The variable has a normal distribution with mean μ= 25 feet² and standard deviation δ= 3 feet²

since the variable has a normal distribution, you have to convert it to standard normal distribution to be able to use the tabulated accumulated probabilities.

a.

P(X>27)

First step is to standardize the value of X using Z= (X-μ)/ δ ~N(0;1)

P(Z>(27-25)/3)

P(Z>0.67)

Now that you have the corresponding Z value you can look for it in the table, but since tha table has probabilities of , you have to do the following conervertion:

P(Z>0.67)= 1 - P(Z≤0.67)= 1 - 0.74857= 0.25143

b.

There was a sample of 20 cans taken and you need to calculate the probability of painting on average an area of 540 feet².

The sample mean has the same distribution as the variable it is ariginated from, but it's variability is affected by the sample size, so it has a normal distribution with parameners:

X[bar]~N(μ;δ²/n)

So the Z you have to use to standardize the value of the sample mean is Z=(X[bar]-μ)/(δ/√n)~N(0;1)

To paint 540 feet² using 20 cans you have to paint around 540/20= 27 feet² per can.

c.

P(X≤27) = P(Z≤(27-25)/(3/√20))= P(Z≤2.98)= 0.999

d.

No. If the distribution is skewed and not normal, you cannot use the normal distribution to calculate the probabilities. You could use the central limit theorem to approximate the sampling distribution to normal if the sample size was 30 or grater but this is not the case.

I hope it helps!