Mayfield Coursework

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Maths Coursework

I have been given the task to test various hypotheses through using statistical information of a fictional school called Mayfield High. I have been given various pieces of information about this school but I will first need to extract the useful information which can help me to test these hypotheses.

Firstly, here is the hypothesis’s I have decided on:

1. Boys will be taller on average than girls

2. Boys will on average weigh more than what girls do.

3. As the age of a boy increases so does his weight.

4. The taller someone is the heavier they will be.

Before I test these hypotheses, I must first gain the useful data which will help me test them. Since the amount of students in each gender of every year varies, I must use a stratified sample. This means that I will use an equal percentage of each gender in every year throughout the school, making the sampling fair.

I want to have a sample of about 120 students. This is because the data I will gain from these 120 students will be highly useful and not too confusing for me to handle. There are 1183 students in the whole school and 120 is about 10%, which seems to be quite a good percentage to use.

To work out the number of pupils I would use in my hypothesis in each gender of every year group I will use the the following method:

        

As the answer I gained from this was 15 I would need to find fifteen random numbers between 1 and 151 as this was how many year 7 boys there were situated in the school. I did this on a calculator by pressing rand# and rounded of the decimals as this was a fair way of gaining these numbers. I eventually did the same thing with every gender of every year although I would get different amounts of random numbers (but the same percentage of students). Here are the results I got, which I have split into genders simply because it is clearer:

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After I eventually gained all these random numbers I was able to enter it into the Mayfield high database and find all the relevant information for each people with the corresponding number, such as weight and height. This meant I could now continue with testing my hypotheses.

1st Hypothesis – Boys on average be taller then girls

To test this hypothesis I would need to look at a specific year and split it into the 2 different genders. I would then enter the heights for the boys and girls into separate stem and leaf diagrams and ...

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