The American Heart Association is about to conduct an anti-smoking campaign and wants to know the fraction of Americans over 36 who smoke. In an earlier study, the population proportion was estimated to be 0.2. How large a sample would be required in order to estimate the fraction of Americans over 36 who smoke at the 99% confidence level with an error of at most 0.03? Round your answer up to the next integer.

And rounded up we have that n=1184

Step-by-step explanation:

Previous concepts

A confidence interval is "a range of values that’s likely to include a population value with a certain degree of confidence. It is often expressed a % whereby a population means lies between an upper and lower interval".  

The margin of error is the range of values below and above the sample statistic in a confidence interval.  

Normal distribution, is a "probability distribution that is symmetric about the mean, showing that data near the mean are more frequent in occurrence than data far from the mean".  

Solution to the problem

In order to find the critical value we need to take in count that we are finding the interval for a proportion, so on this case we need to use the z distribution. Since our interval is at 99% of confidence, our significance level would be given by and . And the critical value would be given by:

The margin of error for the proportion interval is given by this formula:  

   (a)  

And on this case we have that and we are interested in order to find the value of n, if we solve n from equation (a) we got:  

  (b)  

And replacing into equation (b) the values from part a we got:

And rounded up we have that n=1184

t = 3

step-by-step explanation:

put t = 3 in this expression :

(3²-1)(3²-2)(3² - 3)(3² - 4) = 8×7×6×5 = 56×30 = 1680