Unit 5, Topic 22, Exercise 22-12 Editorial Styles USA Today is known as the "nation's newspaper." It strives to reach a very broad readership and is, therefore, reputed to be written at a fairly low readability level. On the other hand, the Washington Post generally has a reputation as a more serious newspaper aiming for a more intellectual readership. To assess whether quantitative data can reveal any evidence to support this reputation, consider the following data on sentence lengths (measured by number of words in a sentence) for the lead editorials from January 22, 2007, in USA Today and in the Washington Post: a. Using the five-number summaries provided and the table of sentence lengths, comment on key features of the distributions. Consider two numbers to be roughly equal if the difference is less than two. The lower quartile of USA Today is roughly equal to/ smaller than/ larger than the Washington Post's lower quartile. The median of USA Today is smaller than/ roughly equal to/ larger than the Washington Post's median. The upper quartile of USA Today is smaller than/ roughly equal to/ larger than the Washington Post's upper quartile. The mean of USA Today is roughly equal to/ larger than/ smaller than the Washington Post's mean. USA Today has more sentences than/ fewer sentences than/ about the same number of sentences as the Washington Post. b. Are the technical conditions for a two-sample t-test satisfied? o The sample is not random. o The sample is not large enough. o Both conditions are satisfied. o Neither condition is satisfied. c. Conduct a two-sample t-test to assess whether the sample data support the contention that the sentences in USA Today are shorter than those in the Washington Post. Report all aspects of the test and summarize your conclusion. Round your test statistic to two decimal places. Use the t-distribution table to find a range for the p-value. If there is no lower limit on the p-value, enter 0 for the lower limit. If there is no upper limit on the p-value, enter 1 for the upper limit. Note that group 1 refers to USA Today and group 2 refers to Washington Post. = = > < > < The test statistic is t= -0.32 ___?? ___ p-value 1.00 Based on the p-value, we reject/ do not reject H0. d. Select all of the quantitative variables that could have been measured to compare the editorial styles of the two newspapers. o o o o o o Subject of article Average number of syllables per word Percentage of distinct words Location of publisher Font color Number of pronouns per passage