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University of Minnesota
School of Statistics
Next: Recitation 9 Up: Recitation Sections Previous: Recitation 7

Recitation 8


A Problem on the Binomial Distribution


This is Problem 5.57. While he was a prisoner of the Germans during World War II, John Kerrich tossed a coin 10,000 times. He got 5067 heads. Take Kerrich's tosses to be an SRS from the population of all possible tosses of this coin. If the coin is perfectly balanced, p = 0.5. Is there reason to think that Kerrich's coin gave too many heads to be balanced? To answer this question, find the probability that a balanced coin would give 5067 or more heads in 10,000 tosses. What do you conclude?



Luke Tierney
2000-05-15