Elected officials in a small Florida town are preparing the annual budget for their community. They would like to determine whether their constituents living across town are typically paying the same amount in real estate taxes each year. Given that there are over 3000 homeowners in this small community, officials have decided to sample a representative subset of taxpayers and thoroughly study their tax payments. A randomly selected set of 170 homeowners is given in the file P10_33.XLS. Specifically, the elected officials would like to test for the existence of a statistical difference between the mean real estate tax bill paid by residents of the first neighborhood of this town and each of the remaining five neighborhoods (i.e., neighborhoods 2 through 6).

a. Before conducting any hypothesis tests on the difference between various pairs of mean real estate tax payments, perform a test for equal population variances for each pair of neighborhoods. For each pair, report a p-value and interpret its meaning.

b. Based on your conclusions in part a, which test statistic should be used in performing a test for the existence of a difference between population means in each pair?

c. Given your conclusions in part b, appropriately perform each of the tests for the existence of a difference between mean real estate tax payments in each pair of neighborhoods. For each pair, report a p-value and interpret its meaning.