Question

A quality characteristic of interest for a flour-bag-filling process is the weight of the flour in the individual bags. If the bags are underfilled, the company may be in violation of the truth-in-labeling laws. In this example, the label weight on the package indicates that, on average, there are 10 pounds of flour in a bag. If the average amount of flour in a bag exceeds the label weight, the company is giving away product. Getting an exact amount of flour in a bag is problematic because of variation in the temperature and humidity inside the factory, and the extremely fast filling operation of the machine (approximately 150 bags a minute). The following table provides the weight in pounds of a sample of 70 bags produced in one hour by a single machine:

Mean- 10.11

Median- 10.11

Variance-0.59185038

Standard Deviation-0.243279753

d. Interpret the measures of central tendency within the context of this problem. Should the company producing the flour bags be concerned about the central tendency, and why or why not?

e. Interpret the measures of variation within the context of this problem. Should the company producing the flour bags be concerned about variation, and why or why not?   

Answer 1