High Mountain produces a variety of climbing and mountaineering equipment. One of its products is a traditional three-strand climbing rope. An important characteristic of any climbing rope is its tensile strength.

High Mountain produces the three-strand rope on two separate production lines: one in Bozeman and the other in Challis. The Bozeman line has recently installed new production equipment. High Mountain regularly tests the tensile strength of its ropes by randomly selecting ropes from production and subjecting them to various tests. The most recent random sample of ropes, taken after the new equipment was installed at the Bozeman plant, revealed the following:

Bozeman Challis x1 = 7,200 lb x2 = 7,087 lb s1 = 425 lb s2 = 415 lb n1 = 25 n2 = 20 High Mountain’s production managers are willing to assume that the population of tensile strengths for each plant is approximately normally distributed with equal variances. Based on the sample results, can High Mountain’s managers conclude that there is a difference between the mean tensile strengths of ropes produced in Bozeman and Challis? Conduct the appropriate hypothesis test at the 0.05 level of significance.