TABLE 11-11
a Student Team in a Business Statistics Course

question 141

Essay

TABLE 11-11
A student team in a business statistics course designed an experiment to investigate whether the brand of bubblegum used affected the size of bubbles they could blow. To reduce the person-to-person variability, the students decided to use a randomized block design using themselves as blocks. Four brands of bubblegum were tested. A student chewed two pieces of a brand of gum and then blew a bubble, attempting to make it as big as possible. Another student measured the diameter of the bubble at its biggest point. The following table gives the diameters of the bubbles (in inches) for the 16 observations.
$$\begin{array}{l}\text { Brand of Bubblegum }\\\begin{array} { l c c c c } \hline \text { Student } & \text { A } & \text { B } & \text { C } & \text { D } \\\hline \text { Kyle } & 8.75 & 9.50 & 8.50 & 11.50 \\\text { Sarah } & 9.50 & 4.00 & 8.50 & 11.00 \\\text { Leigh } & 9.25 & 5.50 & 7.50 & 7.50 \\\text { Isaac } & 9.50 & 8.50 & 7.50 & 7.50 \\\hline\end{array}\end{array}$$
-Referring to Table 11-11, what are the degrees of freedom of the F test statistic for testing the block effects?

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Definitions:

Fixed Cost

Costs that do not change with the level of output or sales in the short term, such as rent, salaries, and insurance.

Depreciation Expense

The portion of the total cost of a tangible asset that is charged as an expense in a reporting period, due to its reduction in useful life.

Sensitivity Analysis

A technique used to determine how different values of an independent variable impact a particular dependent variable under a given set of assumptions.

Variable Costs

Expenditures that increase or decrease in tandem with production volume.