Question

The human body maintains its internal temperature through thermoregulation, and a healthy adult has a mean body temperature of 98.6 °F. The processes of thermoregulation begin to deteriorate in older age, making it difficult to diagnose elderly patients who might have an illness. To understand the body temperature of elderly patients, researchers randomly sampled the body temperatures of elderly patients from a large database of medical records where the body temperatures were normally distributed.

Conduct a two‑tailed, one‑sample ?t‑test to determine whether the mean body temperature of the elderly patients is different from that of a healthy adult using the sample data below (in degrees Farenheit). Use a significance level of ?=0.05α=0.05. If the requirements for a ?t‑test have not been met, only answer the first question. Otherwise, answer all eight questions.

96.6,96.7,96.8,97.4,97.4,97.8,97.8,98.2,98.4,98.996.6,96.7,96.8,97.4,97.4,97.8,97.8,98.2,98.4,98.9

If you wish, you may to download the data in your preferred format.  

CrunchIt!    CSV   Excel   JMP   Mac Text    Minitab   PC Text   R   SPSS   TI Calc  

Are the requirements for the one-sample ?t‑test met? Why or why not?

If the requirements have not been met, do not continue. Otherwise, select the null and alternative hypotheses for the test.

Calculate the one‑sample ?t‑statistic to two decimal places and the resulting ?p‑value of the test to three decimal places. You may calculate ?t by hand if you wish, but you will need software to compute the ?p‑value. Click on this link to load the given data set into the statistical software CrunchIt.

Select the conclusion of the test at a significance level of ?=0.05α=0.05.

The researchers

the null hypothesis. There is

98.6 °F.

to conclude that the mean body temperature of elderly patients is

Answer 1