Step 1 :The problem is asking for the critical value assuming that the population variances are equal. This is a two-sample t-test problem. The critical value is the t-score that corresponds to the given significance level (alpha) in a t-distribution. The degrees of freedom for this t-distribution is \(n_{1} + n_{2} - 2\), where \(n_{1}\) and \(n_{2}\) are the sample sizes.
Step 2 :Given that \(\alpha = 0.025\), \(n_{1} = 13\), and \(n_{2} = 11\), we can calculate the degrees of freedom as \(df = n_{1} + n_{2} - 2 = 22\).
Step 3 :The critical value is the t-score that corresponds to the 2.5% significance level in the left tail of a t-distribution with 22 degrees of freedom. The critical value is approximately -2.074.
Step 4 :Final Answer: The critical value is approximately \(\boxed{-2.074}\).