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Recitation 2 · Pop Quiz

Pop Quiz: Cheese Product Comparison

An in-class activity from the course slides — reproduced here so you can find it again after class.

📋 What to do

  1. Three firms produce cheese in Upstate New York. Each firm sampled units off the production line and recorded how long it took each unit to mold — the time to failure, in hours.
  2. Take the three vectors a, b, and c from the next card into R (or Python).
  3. Using your descriptive statistics — mean, median, standard deviation, coefficient of variation — evaluate the three distributions.
  4. Decide which firm you would buy your cheese from: A, B, or C. Be ready to say why.

🧀 The data — three firms’ times to mold (hours)

Firm A is a, Firm B is b, Firm C is c. Paste these straight in — they are the same numbers that are on the slide, so nothing has to be transcribed by eye.

a = c(50, 70, 125, 235, 230, 200, 180, 260, 300, 500, 275, 280)

b = c(300, 380, 250, 50, 55, 57, 60, 65, 100, 150, 250, 200,
      150, 175, 225, 200, 225, 250)

c = c(400, 300, 400, 300, 350, 200, 250, 300, 330, 375)

In Python, the same three as lists: a = [50, 70, ...] — the numbers do not change, only the brackets do.

📮 Submit

The quiz opens on Canvas during class (1 pt) — graded on accuracy. You will find it in this week’s module on Canvas once your instructor opens it.

Note: these instructions are the current version — the activity is written and kept up to date on this page, links to slide decks and helper materials included. Submit on Canvas; the due date and your grade live there.