Took this question out of my textbook, and am a little stuck. Thanks in advance.
ID: 2958753 • Letter: T
Question
Took this question out of my textbook, and am a little stuck. Thanks in advance.Different varieties of the tropical flower Heliconia are fertilized by different species of hummingbirds. Over time, the lengths of the flowers and the form of the hummingbirds' beaks have evolved to match each other. Here are data on the lengths (mm) of three randomly selected varieties of these flowers on the island of Dominica.
H. bihai 47.12 46.75 46.81 47.12 46.67 47.43 46.44 46.64 48.07
48.34 48.15 50.26 50.12 46.34 46.94 48.36
H. caribaea red 41.90 39.63 38.10 42.01 42.18 37.97 41.93 40.66 38.79
43.09 37.87 38.23 41.47 39.16 38.87 39.78 38.20 38.01
40.57 38.07
H. caribaea yellow 36.78 37.02 36.52 36.11 36.03 35.45 38.13 37.1 35.17
36.82 36.66 35.68 36.03 34.57 34.63
[6] Do the mean lengths of Heliconia flowers differ?
Explanation / Answer
"Mean" is another word for average. This question wants you to compare the average length of the Bihai, Red, and Yellow flowers. In order to find an average you need to add up all the individual results and then divide that by the number of individual results. For example, to find the average length of the bihai flower, you would add 47.12 + 46.75 + 46.81 + 47.12, etc, until you get to 48.36. Once you have added all the numbers in the bihai list, you should have a very large number. Take that large number, and divide it by 16, since that is the number of individual flower lengths in the bihai list. The result is the average length of the bihai flower. Now, you want to do the same thing for the red flower list (add all the numbers in the red list, from 41.90 to 38.07, then divide by the number of items in the list, which in this case is 20) and for the yellow list. Once you have all three averages, look to see if they are the same number or different numbers. If they are all the same, then that means that the mean lengths of Heliconia flowers do not differ (differ means they are DIFFERent). If they are different, then they do differ. It is possible that two of the averages are the same, and one is different. In that case, you would say that the mean lengths of flower x and flower y do not differ from one another, but that they differ from the mean length of flower z.