Q:

A farmer applied different types of fertilizer to two different sections of his watermelon field. At the end of the growing season, the farmer randomly weighed 20 watermelons from each section. The table shows the mean and the mean absolute deviation (MAD) of the weights for each fertilizer.Fertilizer Mean (lb) MAD1 24 32 22 2Calculate the means-to-MAD ratio. Can the farmer conclude that Fertilizer 1 generally produces heavier watermelons?Select from the drop-down menus to correctly answer the question.The farmer (can, cannot) conclude that Fertilizer 1 generally produces heavier watermelons because the distributions of weights for the two fertilizers are (identical, somewhat similar, similar, different).

Accepted Solution

A:
the mean is the average weight.
 the MAD is how spread out the weights are from the mean, the higher the number the more spread out, which means you could have more lower weights than higher weights, of more heavy than light

 so fertilizer 1 had a higher average weight ( 24 is greater than 22)
 and the difference in MAD is only 1 ( 3-2)

so the farmer CAN conclude , because the distribution is SOMEWHAT SIMILAR