Roughly 10% of all college students in the United States are left-handed. Most academic institutions, therefore, try to have at least a few left-handed chairs in each classroom. 225 students are about to enter a lecture hall that has 30 left-handed chairs for a lecture. What is the probability that this is not going to be enough; in other words, what is the probability that more than 30 (or at least 31) of the 225 students are left-handed?
Let's think about this situation.
Let X be the number of left-handed students (success) out of the 225 students (trials). X is therefore binomial with n = 225 and p = .1. We are asked to find P(X > 30) or P(X ≥ 31).
Clearly, doing this using the binomial distribution is out of the question.
- Explain why we can use the normal approximation in this case, and state which normal distribution you would use for the approximation.
- Use the normal approximation to find P(X ≥ 31). For the approximation to be better, use the continuity correction as we did in the last example. In other words, rather than approximating P(X ≥ 31) by P(Y ≥ 31), approximate it by P(Y ≥ 30.5).