Question

the standard deviation of the heights of the heights of a population of males is 24 and the standard deviation of the heights of a population of females is 15. This means that the (answer) of the male heights is higher than that of the female heights

Answer 1

Solution:

The standard deviation of data set gives you measure of spread. Standard deviation tells us how far are the observations from mean. A low standard deviation means most of the numbers are close to the mean and a high standard deviation means most of the values are spread out at away from mean.   

We have given that

Standard deviation of male population height=24

Standard deviation of female population height=15

The standard deviation of males is greater than females however this does not implies that mean of male heights is greater than mean of female heights . This simply means that the averege distance between the dataset values and mean.In this case for female it is 15 and for male is 24.

Therefore we conclude that we cannot say that the male height is greater than female height if the standard deviation of males is greater than standard deviation of females because standard deviation os only a measure of spread.