Question

Questions 6–10 refer to the sample data in the following table, which describes the fate of the passengers and crew aboard the Titanic when it sank on April 15, 1912. Assume that the data are a sample from a large population and we want to use a 0.05 significance level to test the claim that surviving is independent of whether the person is a man, woman, boy, or girl.

	Men	Women	Boys	Girls
Survived	332	318	29	27
Died	1360	104	35	18

Given that the P-value for the hypothesis test is 0.000 when rounded to three decimal places, what do you conclude? What do the results indicate about the rule that women and children should be the first to be saved?

Short answer

There is enough evidence to conclude that thesurvival of the passenger is not independent of whether he/she is a man, woman, boy or girl.

The rule to save women and children first seems to be applied here.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

A contingency table is constructed that shows the number of passengers who survived/died according to whether they were male, female, boy or girl.

Hypotheses

The null hypothesis is as follows:

The survival of the passenger is independent of whether he/she is a man, woman, boy or girl.

The alternative hypothesis is as follows:

The survival of the passenger is not independent of whether he/she is a man, woman, boy or girl.

P-value

The p-value is equal to 0.000.

The level of significance is equal to 0.05.

Since the p-value is less than 0.05, the null hypothesis is rejected.

There is enough evidence to conclude that thesurvival of the passenger is not independent of whether he/she is a man, woman, boy or girl.

Survival of a particular age group/gender

It is a rule that in times of calamities, the women and the children are saved first.

Here, since the survival of the passenger depends upon his/her age group and gender, it can be said that the above rule was followed at the time when the Titanic sank.

This also results in a large number of casualties for the male gender who are adults.