A Company's Manufacturing Process Uses 500 Gallons of Water at a Time

A company's manufacturing process uses 500 gallons of water at a time. A "scrubbing" machine then removes most of a chemical pollutant before pumping the water into a nearby lake. Legally the treated water should contain no more than 80 parts per million of the chemical, but the machine isn't perfect and it is costly to operate. Since there's a fine if the discharged water exceeds the legal maximum, the company sets the machine to attain an average of 75 ppm for the batches of water treated. They believe the machine's output can be described by a Normal model with standard deviation 4.2 ppm. (SHOW WORK.)
a. What percent of the batches of water discharged exceed the 80ppm standard?
b. The company's lawyers insist that they have not more than 2% of the water over the
limit. To what mean value should the company set the scrubbing machine? Assume the standard deviation does not change.
c. Because achieving a mean that low would raise the costs too much, they decide to leave the mean set at 75 ppm and try to reduce the standard deviation to achieve the "only 2% over" goal. Find the new standard deviation needed.
d. Explain what achieving a smaller standard deviation means in this context.

Correct Answer:

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a.



According to the normal model, we...

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