The Action Paper Company employs a human resources manager who is given responsibility for employee benefits. There is a question about the mean annual dental expense per employee. The manager selects a random sample of 49 employee records for the past year and finds the following.

Sample Size..........49

Sample mean ......... $486

Sample standard deviation .....$84

Does the sample data provide evidence to conclude that the mean annual dental expense per employee is less than $500 (using a = .10)? Use the hypothesis testing procedure outlined below.

a. Formulate the null and alternative hypotheses. 

b. State the level of significance.

c. Find the critical value (or values), and clearly show the rejection and non rejection regions.

d. Compute the test statistic.

e. Decide whether you can reject Ho and accept Ha or not.

f. Explain and interpret your conclusion in part e. What does this mean?

g. Determine the observed p-value for the hypothesis test and interpret this value. What does this mean?

h. Does this sample data provide evidence (with a = 0.10), that the mean annual dental expense per employee is less than $500?

Given that

x- = $ 486

n = 49

s = $84