The purpose of the statistical methods that have been discussed so far is to estimate a
population parameter by means of a sample statistic. Another class of statistical methods
is used for testing hypotheses about population parameters or for measuring the amount
of evidence against a hypothesis.
Consider the universe of students in a college. Let the variable X be the number of
pounds by which a student's weight deviates from the ideal weight for a person of the
same sex, height, and build. You want to find out whether the population of students is,
on the average, underweight or overweight. To this end, ...
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