You are the owner of “Poptastic”. For the past few years, to help supplement your family’s income, you have sold premium, homemade popsicles from your food truck and a few local businesses in Pensacola, FL. You want to take a close look at your monthly popsicle sales (in number of popsicles sold):

January	February	March	April	May	June	July	August	September	October	November	December
238	364	418	428	508	718	842	746	580	508	450	324

1. Use Microsoft Excel to create the following visuals for your monthly popsicle sales (be sure to label things where appropriate):

• Bar graph
• Line graph

Using what you know about the trends and changes in your popsicle sales along with what you have learned about the differences between bar graphs and line graphs, which visual do you feel most clearly communicates your monthly popsicle sales for the year?

2. Use formulas in Microsoft Excel to calculate the following for your monthly popsicle sales (round to two decimal places when necessary):

• Mean
• Median
• Mode
• 5-Number Summary
• Outliers (if any)
• Range
• Sample standard deviation

3. What do you feel is the best measure of central tendency for your monthly popsicles sales, the mean or median? Why?

4. Assume this data set approximately follows a normal distribution. What is the z-score for 800 popsicles? What is the probability that you will sell over 800 popsicles in one month? Using this z-score and the standard normal probability distribution table or calculator you use in ALEKS (OR formulas in Excel), find the probability that you will sell over 800 popsicles in one month. Round to 4 decimal places.

5. You are considering hiring some part-time help. Based on a friend’s analysis of your business (he is a business consultant), he says it would be best to only hire part-time work for months where monthly popsicle sales were more than 1 standard deviation above the mean. According to his advice, which months should you hire part-time help? Why?