The Student Room Group

S2 - what is a reasonable upper limit???

I had a question:

Obtain a value c which is a reasonable upper limit for the number of babies born in Britain in a year.

Reasonable upper limit sounds vague???

In the previous question it asked for a range 95% of values (in the middle so I guessed at p=97.5% of values.

The distribution was:

Y~N(744600, 744600) - this I know I got right.

The book result was 747000.

I thought maybe they wanted 3 standard deviation points above the mean. Exactly this is 747188. Would they have used 3sd and rounded to 3s.f.???

Or does reasonable upper limit have some definite meaning in statistics???

Or was the question worded ambiguously? It was a MEI S2 question apparently.
Original post by acomber
I had a question:

Obtain a value c which is a reasonable upper limit for the number of babies born in Britain in a year.

Reasonable upper limit sounds vague???

In the previous question it asked for a range 95% of values (in the middle so I guessed at p=97.5% of values.

The distribution was:

Y~N(744600, 744600) - this I know I got right.

The book result was 747000.

I thought maybe they wanted 3 standard deviation points above the mean. Exactly this is 747188. Would they have used 3sd and rounded to 3s.f.???

Or does reasonable upper limit have some definite meaning in statistics???

Or was the question worded ambiguously? It was a MEI S2 question apparently.


I have never come across one.

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