Include diagrams and calculations for the following: ​​​​​

A.In a recent random sample of 200 students at a large university who were recently forced to watch their lectures on-line, 65 indicated that they preferred on-line lectures as opposed to the normal in-class lectures. Estimate, with 90% confidence, the true proportion of all students at this large university who prefer on-line lectures. (Include a concluding statement similar to concluding statements from examples already covered in class.)

B.In a random sample of 50 Nevada automobile owners who recently had the oil in their cars changed, 30 asked for synthetic oil. Estimate, with 99% confidence, the population proportion of Nevada automobile owners who preferred synthetic oil over regular oil. (No concluding statement is necessary when answering this question.)

Matt and Meg Comer are married. They do not have any children. Matt works as a history professor at a local university and earns a salary of $64,000. Meg works part-time at the same university. She earns $21,000 a year. The couple does not itemize deductions. Other than salary, the Comers’ only other source of income is from the disposition of various capital assets (mostly stocks). Assume they file a joint return. (Use the tax rate schedules.) (Round final answers to the nearest whole dollar amount.)

a. What is the Comers’ tax liability for 2017 if they report the following capital gains and losses for the year?

study of the effect of college student employment on academic performance, the following summary statistics for GPA were reported for a sample of students who worked and for a sample of students who did not work. The samples were selected at random from working and nonworking students at a university. (Use a statistical computer package to calculate the P-value. Use μ_employed − μ_{not employed}. Round your test statistic to two decimal places, your df down to the nearest whole number, and your P-value to three decimal places.)

t= df= P=
Does this information support the hypothesis that for students at this university, those who are not employed have a higher mean GPA than those who are employed? Use a significance level of 0.05.

3. We want to estimate the difference between the mean starting salaries for recent graduates with mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering bachelor’s degrees from an university. The following information is provided:

a) A random sample of 49 starting salaries for mechanical engineering graduates produced a sample mean of $64,650 and a standard deviation of $7,000.

b) A random sample of 36 starting salaries for aerospace engineering graduates produced a sample mean of $63,420 and a standard deviation of $6,830.

(1) Find a 95% confidence interval for the difference between the two mean starting salaries.

(2) Someone made a statement that mechanical engineering new graduates make more money than aerospace engineering new graduates on average at the university. Do you agree with the statement? Explain why.

How a Welsh jeans firm became a cult global brand

With a look of concentration on her face, a worker guides the sheet of denim through the sewing machine, and a pair of jeans starts to take shape.

As the needle goes up and down in a blur of movement and rattling noise, a line of stitching starts to form a neat trouser leg.

When most people think about the global fashion industry it is safe to say that a sleepy town in far west Wales does not immediately spring to mind.

Yet Cardigan, on Wales' Irish Sea coast, has for the past five years been home to a high-end jeans-maker - the Hiut Denim Company.

Beloved by a growing number of fashionistas from New York to Paris, and London to Melbourne, Hiut ships its expensive jeans around the world.

As orders arrive via its website, Hiut's workforce of just 15 people gets to work hand-cutting and sewing the trousers from giant rolls of indigo-coloured denim that the company imports from Turkey and Japan.

Despite only making around 120 pairs of jeans a week, founder and owner David Hieatt has big ambitions to expand.

While it may seem a little incongruous that a posh jeans business is based in west Wales, Cardigan (population 4,000) actually has a long history of jeans-making.

For almost 40 years the town was home to a factory that made 35,000 pairs of jeans each week for UK retailer Marks & Spencer. But in 2002 the facility closed with the loss of 400 jobs when production was moved to Morocco to cut costs.

Fast forward 10 years, and when Mr Hieatt - a proud Welshman - was looking to open a factory to start making jeans, he chose Cardigan. The company name is a combination of the first two letters of Mr Hieatt's surname and the word "utility".

"Where better to locate ourselves than in a town with a history of jeans-making, where the expertise remains?" he says.

Employing machinists who had previously worked in the old factory and not lost their years of jeans-making skills, Mr Hieatt says he was confident that Hiut could be successful if it concentrated on selling directly to consumers around the world via its website.

"Without the internet we'd have been dead within 12 weeks," he says. "But the internet has changed only everything. The internet allows us to sell direct and keep the [profit] margin... it enables us to compete."

Now exporting 25% of its jeans, it takes Hiut about one hour and 10 minutes to make one pair, compared with 11 minutes at a highly mechanised jeans industry giant.

And rather than staff doing just one part of the manufacturing process, such as sewing on the pockets, each machinist at Hiut makes a pair of jeans from start to finish.

Mr Hieatt refers to the workers as "grand masters". This is in reference to the fact that some of them have more than 40 years of jeans-making experience, and new joiners have to train for three years before they can start making jeans for customers.

In running Hiut Mr Hieatt and his co-owner, wife Clare, have benefited from their experience of previously owning a clothing firm called Howies, which they sold to US firm Timberland for £3.2m in 2011.

But what has also been invaluable is Mr Hieatt's previous career working in advertising.

This advertising nous has enabled him to very effectively market and promote Hiut, from its snazzy website, to its extensive use of social media; both adverts in people's Facebook feeds and arty photos of people wearing its jeans.

"The interesting thing about social media for me is that up until Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and SnapChat you had to have a huge budget in order to tell your story," he says.

"In effect you were locked out of telling that story because the costs [of advertising and wider marketing] were too high. But social media has actually allowed the smaller maker [small firms that manufacture things] to go and tell his story.

"And actually, if David wants to beat Goliath, the best tool in the world is social media."

Mr Hieatt also sends out free jeans to what he calls "influencers", either fashion bloggers or famous people, in the hope that they will write or talk positively about the brand.

Successful examples of this have been an increase in orders from Denmark after Hiut sent a pair of its jeans to celebrated Danish chef Rene Redzepi, and also UK TV presenter Anthony McPartlin of the duo Ant & Dec tweeting about the company.

As Hiut continues to win overseas orders for its jeans costing up to £230 ($300) a pair, Mr Hieatt admits that one negative issue the company has to deal with is a return rate of "about 14%" - people sending them back because they don't fit.

To counter this problem Hiut is exploring using technology that can accurately tell from a photo a person's perfect jeans size.

Dr Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas, fashion marketing course leader at London College of Fashion, says that if Hiut wants to expand its overseas sales it needs to "have the website in different languages" and consider partnerships that will see its jeans listed on other websites.

Back at Hiut's small factory on the edge of Cardigan, Mr Hieatt says the long-term aim remains to recreate 400 jeans-making jobs in the town.

"Our aim is to get 400 people their jobs back. If you ask me when is that going to happen, the honest answer is I don't know.

"But I believe in compound interest. Small things over time gather huge numbers."

QUESTION:

What international marketing strategy would you recommend to the firm?

Summarize two topics you found to be most noteworthy in this reading. Must be in own word(200words).

Buffet Essays I. Preferred Stock

When Richard Branson, the wealthy owner of Virgin Atlantic Airways, was asked how to become a millionaire, he had a quick answer: "There's really nothing to it. Start as a billionaire and then buy an airline." Unwilling to accept Branson's proposition on faith, your Chairman decided in 1989 to test it by investing $358 million in a 91/4% preferred stock of USAir. I liked and admired Ed Colodny, the company's then-CEO, and I still do. But my analysis of USAir's business was both superficial and wrong. I was so beguiled by the company's long history of profitable operations, and by the protection that ownership of a senior security seemingly offered me, that I overlooked the crucial point: USAir's revenues would increasingly feel the effects of an unregulated, fiercely competitive market whereas its cost structure was a holdover from the days when regulation protected profits. These costs, if left unchecked, portended disaster, however reassuring the airline's past record might be. ([Again, if] history supplied all of the answers, the Forbes 400 would consist of librarians.) To rationalize its costs, however, USAir needed major improvements in its labor contracts-and that's something most airlines have found it extraordinarily difficult to get, short of credibly threatening, or actually entering, bankruptcy. USAir was to be no exception. Immediately after we purchased our preferred stock, the imbalance between the company's costs and revenues began to grow explosively. In the 1990-1994 period, USAir lost an aggregate of $2.4 billion, a performance that totally wiped out the book equity of its common stock. For much of this period, the company paid us our preferred dividends, but in 1994 payment was suspended. A bit later, with the situation looking particularly gloomy, we wrote down our investment by 75%, to $89.5 million. Thereafter, during much of 1995, I offered to sell our shares at 50% of face value. Fortunately, I was unsuccessful. Mixed in with my many mistakes at USAir was one thing I got right: Making our investment, we wrote into the preferred contract a somewhat unusual provision stipulating that "penalty dividends"- to run five percentage points over the prime rate-would be accrued on any arrearages. This meant that when our 91/4% dividend was omitted for two years, the unpaid amounts compounded at rates ranging between 131/4% and 14%. Facing this penalty provision, USAir had every incentive to pay arrearages just as promptly as it could. And in the second half of 1996, when USAir turned profitable, it indeed began to pay, giving us $47.9 million. We owe Stephen Wolf, the company's CEO, a huge thank-you for extracting a performance from the airline that permitted this payment. Even so, USAir's performance has recently been helped significantly by an industry tailwind that may be cyclical in nature. The company still has basic cost problems that must be solved. In any event, the prices of USAir's publicly-traded securities tell us that our preferred stock is now probably worth its par value of $358 million, give or take a little. In addition, we have over the years collected an aggregate of $240.5 million in dividends (including $30 million received in 1997). Early in 1996, before any accrued dividends had been paid, I tried once more to unload our holdings-this time for about $335 million. You're lucky: I again failed in my attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. In another context, a friend once asked me: "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?" After reviewing my sorry performance with USAir, you may conclude he had a point. We continue to hold the convertible preferred stocks described in earlier reports: $700 million of Salomon Inc., $600 million of The Gillette Company, $358 million of USAir Group, Inc., and $300 million of Champion International Corp. Our Gillette holdings will be converted into 12 million shares of common stock on April 1. Weighing interest rates, credit quality and prices of the related common stocks, we can assess our holdings in Salomon and Champion at yearend 1990 as worth about what we paid, Gillette as worth somewhat more, and USAir as worth substantially less. In making the USAir purchase, your Chairman displayed exquisite timing: I plunged into the business at almost the exact moment that it ran into severe problems. (No one pushed me; in tennis parlance, I committed an "unforced error.") The company's troubles were brought on both by industry conditions and by the post-merger difficulties it encountered in integrating Piedmont, an affliction I should have expected since almost all airline mergers have been followed by operational turmoil. In short order, Ed Colodny and Seth Schofield resolved the second problem: The airline now gets excellent marks for service. Industry-wide problems have proved to be far more serious. Since our purchase, the economics of the airline industry have deteriorated at an alarming pace, accelerated by the kamikaze pricing tactics of certain carriers. The trouble this pricing has produced for all carriers illustrates an important truth: In a business selling a commodity- type product, it's impossible to be a lot smarter than your dumbest competitor. However, unless the industry is decimated during the next few years, our USAir investment should work out all right. Ed and Seth decisively addressed the current turbulence by making major changes in operations. Even so, our investment is now less secure than at the time I made it. Our convertible preferred stocks are relatively simple securities, yet I should warn you that, if the past is any guide, you may from time to time read inaccurate or misleading statements about them. Last year, for example, several members of the press calculated the value of all our preferreds as equal to that of the common stock into which they are convertible. By their logic, that is, our Salomon preferred, convertible into common at $38, would be worth 60% of face value if Salomon common were selling at $22.80. But there is a small problem with this line of reasoning: Using it, one must conclude that all of a value of a convertible preferred resides in the conversion privilege and that value of a nonconvertible preferred of Salomon would be zero, no matter what its coupon or terms for redemption. The point you should keep in mind is that most of the value of our convertible preferreds is derived from their fixed-income characteristics. That means the securities cannot be worth less than the value they would possess as non-convertible preferreds and may be worth more because of their conversion options. Berkshire made five private purchases of convertible preferred stocks during the 1987-91 period and the time seems right to discuss their status. In each case we had the option of sticking with these preferreds as fixed-income securities or converting them into common stock. Initially, their value to us came primarily from their fixedincome characteristics. The option we had to convert was a kicker. Our $300 million private purchase of American Express "Peres" . . . was a modified form of common stock whose fixedincome characteristics contributed only a minor portion of its initial value. Three years after we bought them, the Peres automatically were converted to common stock. In contrast, [our other convertible preferred stocks] were set to become common stocks only if we wished them to-a crucial difference. When we purchased our convertible securities, I told you that we expected to earn after-tax returns from them that "moderately" exceeded what we could earn from the medium-term fixed-income securities they replaced. We beat this expectation-but only because of the performance of a single issue. I also told you that these securities, as a group, would "not produce the returns we can achieve when we find a business with wonderful economic prospects." Unfortunately, that prediction was fulfilled. Finally, I said that "under almost any conditions, we expect these preferreds to return us our money plus dividends." That's one I would like to have back. Winston Churchill once said that "eating my words has never given me indigestion." My assertion, however, that it was almost impossible for us to lose money on our preferreds has caused me some well-deserved heartburn. Our best holding has been Gillette, which we told you from the start was a superior business. Ironically, though, this is also the purchase in which I made my biggest mistake-of a kind, however, never recognized on financial statements. We paid $600 million in 1989 for Gillette preferred shares that were convertible into 48 million (split-adjusted) common shares. Taking an alternative route with the $600 million, I probably could have purchased 60 million shares of common from the company. The market on the common was then about $10.50, and given that this would have been a huge private placement carrying important restrictions, I probably could have bought the stock at a discount of at least 5%. I can't be sure about this, but it's likely that Gillette's management would have been just as happy to have Berkshire opt for common. But I was far too clever to do that. Instead, for less than two years, we received some extra dividend income (the difference between the preferred's yield and that of the common), at which point the company-quite properly-called the issue, moving to do that as quickly as was possible. If I had negotiated for common rather than preferred, we would have been better off at yearend 1995 by $625 million, minus the "excess" dividends of about $70 million. In the case of Champion, the ability of the company to call our preferred at 115% of cost forced a move out of us last August that we would rather have delayed. In this instance, we converted our shares just prior to the pending call and offered them to the company at a modest discount. Charlie and I have never had a conviction about the paper industry-actually, I can't remember ever owning the common stock of a paper producer in my 54 years of investing-so our choice in August was whether to sell in the market or to the company..., Our Champion capital gain was moderate-about 19% after tax from a six-year investment-but the preferred delivered us a good after-tax dividend yield throughout our holding period. (That said, many press accounts have overstated the after-tax yields earned by property-casualty insurance companies on dividends paid to them. What the press has failed to take into account is a change in the tax law that took effect in 1987 and that significantly reduced the dividends received credit applicable to insurers. For details, see [Part V.H.].) Our First Empire preferred [was to] be called on March 31, 1996, the earliest date allowable. We are comfortable owning stock in well-run banks, and we will convert and keep our First Empire common shares. Bob Wilmers, CEO of the company, is an outstanding banker, and we love being associated with him. Our other two preferreds have been disappointing, though the Salomon preferred has modestly outperformed the fixed-income securities for which it was a substitute. However, the amount of management time Charlie and I have devoted to this holding has been vastly greater than its economic significance to Berkshire. Certainly I never dreamed I would take a new job at age 60-Salomon interim chairman, that is-because of an earlier purchase of a fixed-income security. Soon after our purchase of the Salomon preferred in 1987, I wrote that I had "no special insights regarding the direction or future profitability of investment banking." Even the most charitable commentator would conclude that I have since proved my point. To date, our option to convert into Salomon common has not proven of value. Furthermore, the Dow Industrials have doubled since I committed to buy the preferred, and the brokerage group has performed equally as well. That means my decision to go with Salomon because I saw value in the conversion option must be graded as very poor. Even so, the preferred has continued under some trying conditions to deliver as a fixed-income security, and the 9% dividend is currently quite attractive. Unless the preferred is converted, its terms require redemption of 20% of the issue on October 31 of each year, 1995-99, and $140 million of our original $700 million was taken on schedule last year. (Some press reports labeled this a sale, but a senior security that matures is not "sold.") Though we did not elect to convert the preferred that matured last year, we have four more bites at the conversion apple, and I believe it quite likely that we will yet find value in our right to convert.

In 2019, Special Corporation, a calendar year C corporation, has a $75,000 charitable contribution carryover from a gift made in 2014. Special Corporation is contemplating a gift of land to a qualified charity in either 2019 or 2020. Special Corporation purchased the land as an investment five years ago for $100,000 (current year value is $250,000). Before considering any charitable deduction, Special Corporation projects taxable income of $1 million for 2019 and $1.2 million for 2020. Should Special Corporation make the gift of land to charity in 2019 or 2020? Provide detailed calculations and support for your answer.

Chinese furniture industry analysis from 2010 to 2020 export and import write less than 3000 words

So far, things have gone well with Dr. Bueller. Before you wrap up your meetings and he begins investing, you decide to spend a little time sharing information with him about using derivatives to manage risk and enhance returns in his stock portfolio. You decide the best way to illustrate this is via a call option that he can use on a stock that might have some upside potential. If the stock does not reach the potential, the option minimizes the risk. The stock is AXQ Enterprises—a high-tech firm that did well during the Internet boom but declined when the boom turned into a bust. If the company’s new portal software is adopted by a large number of consumers over the next few months, you believe the stock can go much higher. The 6-month options are priced at US$1, the strike price is US$22, and the current price for AXQ stock is US$20. Put together a report of 4–6 pages (body of report) with a table or graph included that illustrates what advice you would give Dr. Bueller on the options if the price of the stock was US$18, US$21, US$24, or US$28 at the end of 6 months. Assignment Guidelines Create a report of 4–6 pages (body of report) for Dr. Bueller that includes the following: Your table or graph that contains the stock option data and the profit/loss depending on the hypothetical stock prices of US$18, US$21, US$24, or US$28 at the end of the 6-month period. Your recommendations on whether or not to exercise the option based on the 4 hypothetical stock prices. Explain the reasoning behind your recommendations. Answer the following questions: What happens if the stock price hits US$23? What happens if the stock price hits US$23.01? What purpose could adding a technology company into a stock portfolio serve? Please be sure that your report adheres to the general format above. Your submitted assignment must include the following: A report of 4–6 pages (body of report) that includes a title page, your stock option information table or graph, your stock option recommendations, and your answers to the questions listed in the Assignment Guidelines. Be sure to include a complete explanation of the rationale supporting your recommendations.