We can treat these provincial data as two random samples of total deaths from Eastern vs. Western Canada and that age of death is normally distributed. Given this sample data the average age of death for Western Canada is approximately 79 years with standard deviation of 10.5 years while the average age of death for Eastern Canada is 80 years with standard deviation of 13.5 years. Over the pandemic there were 2328 deaths recorded in the sample for Western Canada and 9374 for Eastern Canada.

a) Assuming you believe Eastern Canada has higher population variance, perform a difference of variance test to confirm this belief at the 10% level of significance. (Hint: you might not need an exact critical value)

b) Given your results from the test in part a), at the 0.5% level of significance, test if Eastern Canada has a different average age of death from Covid in the population.