Question

Cell Phones and Crashes: Analyzing Newspaper Report In an article from the Associated Press, it was reported that researchers “randomly selected 100 New York motorists who had been in an accident and 100 who had not been in an accident. Of those in accidents, 13.7 percent owned a cellular phone, while just 10.6 percent of the accident-free drivers had a phone in the car.” What is wrong with these results?

Short answer

For a sample size of 100people, the proportion of owning/not owning a phone can neither be 13.7% nor 10.6%.This will result in a decimal value forthe number of people, which is not possible.

Thus, the sample sizes do not match with the given proportions, and the results arewrong.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

For a sample of 100 motorists who have been in an accident, 13.7% owned a phone.

Out of another set of 100 motorists who have not been in an accident, 10.6% had a phone in the car.

Identifying the flaw

Let the sample size be 100.

The proportion of people who have been in an accident and own a cell phone is 13.7%.

Thus,

\(\frac{{13.7}}{{100}} \times 100 = 13.7\).

This means that 13.7 persons own a phone. Since the number of people who own a phone cannot be a decimal value, the result is wrong.

Similarly, out of 100 people, there cannot be a proportion of 10.6% people who had a phone in the car when they had an accident

Therefore, these results appear to be inaccurate.