A biologist studies elephants. She records the weights of 500 newborn elephants in a table. What is the best way for the biologist to estimate the population mean of the newborn elephants’ weights?(1 point)

Question

A biologist studies elephants. She records the weights of 500 newborn elephants in a table. What is the best way for the biologist to estimate the population mean of the newborn elephants’ weights?(1 point)
Responses

Calculate the mean of the first 5 weights in the table.
Calculate the mean of the first 5 weights in the table.

Calculate the mean of 50 randomly selected weights in the table.
Calculate the mean of 50 randomly selected weights in the table.

Calculate the mean of 5 randomly selected weights in the table.
Calculate the mean of 5 randomly selected weights in the table.

Calculate the mean of the first 50 weights in the table.
Calculate the mean of the first 50 weights in the table.

GPT-4o mini · Answer

The best way for the biologist to estimate the population mean of the newborn elephants’ weights is to calculate the mean of 50 randomly selected weights in the table.

This method provides a more representative sample of the entire population compared to using the first 5 or first 50 weights (which may not be representative due to potential biases in the order of data), and a larger sample size of 50 also increases the accuracy of the estimate.