This Exam P sample reference tests Central Limit Theorem. This is a central-limit approximation for a sum of 303 independent daily counts. The standardized cutoff is 0.044191, giving an upper-tail probability of 0.482376 and selecting choice B.
These notes identify the calculation error associated with each wrong letter when that error is reproducible.
AUsing 130 as the standard deviation of the entire sum gives z=100/130 and an upper tail near 0.22; the aggregate standard deviation must grow by the square root of 303.
CRounding the aggregate mean of 999900 to the cutoff before standardizing makes the z-score zero and produces 0.50.
DThis is the lower-tail probability Φ(0.044191), whereas the requested aggregate lies above the cutoff.
EThis is approximately the lower-tail complement of choice A, combining the unscaled one-day standard deviation with the wrong tail direction.
Original practice · fully worked
Original variant: culture-vial usable volume
A laboratory prepares 144 culture vials. The usable liquid volume in each vial is independent, with mean 50 milliliters and standard deviation 12 milliliters. Use a normal approximation to find the probability that the combined usable volume exceeds 7300 milliliters.
A 0.000
B 0.244
C 0.477
D 0.756
E 1.000
Variant answer in brief
The combined mean is 7200 milliliters and the combined standard deviation is 144 milliliters. The upper-tail probability at z=100/144 is 0.243702, so choice B is correct.
Setup
Setup
Let V_i denote usable volume from vial i and let W be the combined volume.
W=i=1∑144Vi
E[W]=144(50)=7200
Model
Model
The independent vial contributions allow variance addition, and the large count supports a central-limit approximation.
SD(W)=12144=144
W∼˙N(7200,1442)
Compute
Compute
Convert 7300 milliliters to a standard-normal score and take the upper tail.
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