Questions: Felipe, a highway safety inspector, is concerned about the potential for accidents caused by boulders that fall down a sandstone cliff beside a main highway. As part of an accident simulator, Felipe models the boulders' weights using a normal distribution with a mean of 563 kg and a standard deviation of 150 kg.
Use this table or the ALEKS calculator to find the percentage of boulders that weigh between 245 kg and 449 kg according to the model. For your intermediate computations, use four or more decimal places. Give your final answer to two decimal places (for example 98.23 %).
% %
Transcript text: Random Variables and Distributions
Normal distribution: Finding a probability, advanced
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Felipe, a highway safety inspector, is concerned about the potential for accidents caused by boulders that fall down a sandstone cliff beside a main highway. As part of an accident simulator, Felipe models the boulders' weights using a normal distribution with a mean of 563 kg and a standard deviation of 150 kg .
Use this table or the ALEKS calculator to find the percentage of boulders that weigh between 245 kg and 449 kg according to the model. For your intermediate computations, use four or more decimal places. Give your final answer to two decimal places (for example $98.23 \%$ ).
$\square \%$ $\square$
Explanation
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Solution
Solution Steps
Step 1: Define the Normal Distribution Parameters
The weights of the boulders are modeled using a normal distribution with the following parameters:
Mean (\( \mu \)): 563 kg
Standard Deviation (\( \sigma \)): 150 kg
Step 2: Calculate Z-scores
To find the probability that the boulders weigh between 245 kg and 449 kg, we first calculate the Z-scores for these values using the formula:
\[
Z = \frac{X - \mu}{\sigma}
\]
For the lower bound (245 kg):
\[
Z_{start} = \frac{245 - 563}{150} = -2.12
\]
For the upper bound (449 kg):
\[
Z_{end} = \frac{449 - 563}{150} = -0.76
\]
Step 3: Calculate the Probability
Using the Z-scores, we can find the probability that a boulder weighs between 245 kg and 449 kg: