Herr Foods, a producer of a variety of salty snacks, performs taste tests to compare how consumers react to its products. A product such as horseradish cheddar chips is considered a polarizing product because it has a very strong taste. Consumers tend to rate the product very high or very low, which results in highly variable tastetest ratings for the product. A more standard product, such as regular tortilla chips, typically receives more consistent ratings. The following table shows how seven customers rated each product on a scale of 1–10. The mean and standard deviation for each type of chip are also shown in the table and can be found in the Excel file Herr.xlsx.

Horseradish Cheddar Chips Tortilla Chips 4 8 10 8 10 7 3 8 10 8 9 10 10 7 Mean 8.0 8.0 Standard deviation 3.11 1.00 Even though both products have the same average (mean)

rating, the horseradish cheddar chip is viewed more positively from a marketing perspective if it has a higher standard deviation.

a. Using a = 0.05, determine if the horseradish cheddar chip has a higher variance than the tortilla chip.

b. Verify your results using PHStat.

c. Interpret the p-value obtained from the software.

AppendixLO1