An oil company sends out monthly statements to its customers who purchased gasoline and other items using the company’s credit card. Until now, the company has not included a preaddressed envelope for returning payments. The average and the standard deviation of the number of days before payment is received are 9.8 and 3.2, respectively. As an experiment to determine whether enclosing preaddressed envelopes speeds up payment, 150 customers selected at random were sent preaddressed envelopes with their bills. The numbers of days to payment were recorded.

a. Do the data provide sufficient evidence at the 10% level of significance to establish that enclosure of preaddressed envelopes improves the average speed of payments?

b. Can we conclude at the 10% significance level that the variability in payment speeds decreases when a preaddressed envelope is sent?