an art school knows that in general they go through 38 colored pencils per week. they have asked their students to hold their pencils differently over the past 10 weeks and wonder whether this has made a significant difference in the number of penccils they go through. dat aon pencils that are used up in the past 10 weeks are as follows: 35,38,20,40,36,36,35,35,34,34

What in the world does "in general" mean? Normally, in general you have a mean with some standard deviation known.

run these numbers through your calculator, find mean, and std deviation.

i don't know what is meant by 'in general' means, i am asking the question that is asked of me...please help me, we are beginning one and two tailed tests....i don't know what to do with this

To determine whether there has been a significant difference in the number of pencils used up in the past 10 weeks, we can compare the observed values with the expected value.

Step 1: Calculate the expected value
The expected value is the average number of pencils the art school goes through per week, which is given as 38.

Step 2: Calculate the observed values
The observed values are the actual number of pencils used up each week. From the data given, the observed values for the past 10 weeks are: 35, 38, 20, 40, 36, 36, 35, 35, 34, 34.

Step 3: Calculate the mean
Calculate the mean, or average, of the observed values by adding up all the values and dividing by the number of values. In this case, the sum of the observed values is 35+38+20+40+36+36+35+35+34+34 = 343. There are 10 values, so the mean is 343/10 = 34.3.

Step 4: Calculate the difference between the expected and observed values
Subtract the expected value from the mean to get the difference: 34.3 - 38 = -3.7.

Step 5: Analyze the difference
A negative difference indicates that, on average, fewer pencils were used up compared to the expected value. Therefore, it suggests that holding the pencils differently might have made a significant difference in the number of pencils used up.

To further evaluate this difference and determine if it is statistically significant, statistical tests like hypothesis testing or t-tests can be used. However, for a simple comparison like this, the observed trend of consistently lower values compared to the expected value indicates a potential impact.