Spany sells seeds and claims that 5% of its pansy seeds do not germinate. A packet of pansy seeds contains 20 seeds. Each seed germinates independently of the other seeds.
(a) Find the probability that in a packet of Spany’s pansy seeds
(i) more than 2 but fewer than 5 seeds do not germinate,
(ii) more than 18 seeds germinate.
(5)
Jem buys 5 packets of Spany’s pansy seeds.
(b) Calculate the probability that all of these packets contain more than 18 seeds that germinate.
(2)
Jem believes that Spany’s claim is incorrect. She believes that the percentage of pansy seeds that do not germinate is greater than 5%
(c) Write down the hypotheses for a suitable test to examine Jem’s belief.
(1)
Jem planted all of the 100 seeds she bought from Spany and found that 8 did not germinate.
(d) Using a suitable approximation, carry out the test using a 5% level of significance.
Let V be the number of seeds, out of 100, that do not germinate. Under H0,
V∼B(100,0.05).
Since n is large and p is small, use the Poisson approximation with mean
λ=100(0.05)=5.
Thus, approximately,
V∼Po(5).
The approximate p-value is
P(V⩾8)=1−P(V⩽7)=1−0.866628…=0.133371…≈0.1334.
Since 0.1334>0.05, do not reject H0. There is insufficient evidence at the 5% level of significance that the percentage of Spany’s pansy seeds that do not germinate is greater than 5%.
The observed value, 8, is not in the critical region, so do not reject H0. There is insufficient evidence at the 5% level of significance that the percentage of Spany’s pansy seeds that do not germinate is greater than 5%.
Since 0.126>0.05, do not reject H0. There is insufficient evidence at the 5% level of significance that the percentage of Spany’s pansy seeds that do not germinate is greater than 5%.