Hypothesis Testing: Past Paper Questions

This is the fifth in a sequence of tutorials about hypothesis testing. I look at some questions from past Edexcel S2 exam papers.

Tutorials on hypothesis testing

[MrNichollTV]

Thank you for taking the time to say so!

[MrNichollTV]

When doing a hypothesis test, you do not find the probability of getting exactly the observed outcome. This is because the probability of getting any one particular value is often small, just because there are lots of possibilities. Instead, you find the probability of getting the observed value or an outcome ‘like’ the observed value, where ‘like’ means smaller than the observed value if H1 says that lambda is less than something, and greater than if H1 says lambda is greater than something.

[MrNichollTV]

In this case H1 says that lambda is less than 0.45. So you calculate P(X = 1 or less than 1) rather than P(X = 1).