To illustrate how to relate random numbers to a standard distribution, suppose that daily demand for newspapers from a vending machine is normally distributed with a mean of 55 and standard deviation of 10. (This distribution is shown on the right side of Exhibit TN17.2.) Under this assumption, the gen- eration of daily demand would employ a table of randomly distributed normal numbers (or deviates) in conjunction with the statistical formula D =x+Zo (terms defined later).'