Consider estimating the mean of the population of hospital discharges (Example A of Sect...

Consider estimating the mean of the population of hospital discharges (Example A of Section 7.2) from a simple random sample of size n. Use the normal approximation to the distribution of in answering the following:

Reference

This is the first of many examples in this chapter in which we will illustrate ideas by using a study by Herkson (1976). The population consists of N = 393 short stay hospitals. We will let x_i denote the number of patients discharged from the ith hospital during January 1968. A histogram of the population values is shown in Figure 7.1. The histogram was constructed in the following way: The number of hospitals that discharged 0–200, 201– 400, . . . , 2801–3000 patients were graphed as horizontal lines above the respective intervals. For example, the figure indicates that about

40 hospitals discharged from 601 to 800 patients. The histogram is a convenient graphical representation of the distribution of the values in the population, being more quickly assimilated than would a list of 393 values.