A producer of fine chocolates believes that the sales of two varieties of truffles differ significantly during the holiday season. The first variety is milk chocolate while the second is milk chocolate filled with mint. It is reasonable to assume that truffle sales are normally distributed with unknown but equal population variances. Two independent samples of 18 observations each are collected for the holiday period. A sample mean of 12 million milk chocolate truffles sold with a sample standard deviation of 2.5 million. A sample mean of 13.5 million truffles filled with mint sold with a sample standard deviation of 2.3 million. Use milk chocolate as population 1 and mint chocolate as population 2. Which of the following are the appropriate hypotheses to determine if the average sales of the two varieties of truffles differ significantly during the holiday season?

a. H0: µD ≥ 0, HA: µD < 0
b. H0: µD = 0, HA: µD ≠ 0
c. H0: µ1 – µ2 ≥ 0, HA: µ1 – µ2 < 0
d. H0: µ1 – µ2 = 0, HA: µ1 – µ2 ≠ 0

Given that a producer of fine chocolates believes that the sales of two varieties of truffles differ significantly during the holiday season. The first variety is milk chocolate while the second is milk chocolate filled with mint. It is reasonable to assume that truffle sales are normally distributed with unknown but equal population variances.

Variable A Variable B

Mean 12.00 13.50

SD 2.50 2.30

SEM 0.59 0.54

N 18 18

Hypotheses would be

d. H0: µ1 – µ2 = 0, HA: µ1 – µ2 ≠ 0