To determine the correct statement, let's clarify what a 95% confidence interval represents:

Understanding a 95% Confidence Interval

• A 95% confidence interval provides an estimated range of values which is likely to include the population mean.
• This does not mean that 95% of the samples or individual data points lie within this interval. Rather, it means that if we were to repeatedly take samples from the population and calculate confidence intervals for each sample, 95% of those intervals would contain the true population mean.

Analysis of the Statements

A.) "95% of the 40 samples will lie within that confidence interval."

• False: The confidence interval pertains to the population mean, not the individual sample means or data points. It does not tell us how many of the samples themselves lie within the interval.

B.) "You would be unlikely to find a mean within that confidence interval if you took another sample."

• False: If you were to take another sample from the same population, it's reasonably likely that its mean could be close to the original sample mean, and hence it might lie within the original confidence interval. This statement contradicts the purpose of a confidence interval.

C.) "The population mean will lie outside that confidence interval."

• False: The whole point of calculating a confidence interval is to estimate the range in which the population mean is likely to lie. With a 95% confidence interval, there is a 95% chance that the population mean is within this range.

D.) "5% of the 40 samples will lie within that confidence interval."

• False: This is a misunderstanding of what a confidence interval represents. The 5% figure does not refer to the samples lying within the interval but to the confidence level, indicating that there is a 5% chance that the calculated interval does not contain the population mean.

Conclusion

None of the statements are correct interpretations of what a confidence interval means. The correct interpretation would be that 95% of the confidence intervals constructed from repeated sampling would contain the population mean.

Would you like to explore this concept further, or do you have other questions? Here are some related questions you might find interesting:

1. How is a confidence interval calculated from a sample?
2. What factors affect the width of a confidence interval?
3. How does the sample size impact the confidence interval?
4. What is the difference between confidence intervals and prediction intervals?
5. How does increasing the confidence level affect the interval?
6. What assumptions are needed for a valid confidence interval?
7. Can we say that there is a 95% probability that the population mean lies within a given confidence interval?
8. How would you interpret a confidence interval that includes zero?

Tip: Remember, the confidence interval reflects the range in which we expect the population mean to lie, not the range in which individual sample means or data points will fall.