Problem

Assume that the age for first occurrence of filing personal taxes follows a roughly normal distribution, with a mean $(\mu)$ of 22 years and a standard deviation $(\sigma)$ of 5 years.
What age defines the lowest $40 \%$ of ages?
$18.6 \%$
23.3
25.4
20.7

Answer

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Answer

Final Answer: The age that defines the lowest 40% of ages is approximately \(\boxed{20.73}\) years.

Steps

Step 1 :Assume that the age for first occurrence of filing personal taxes follows a roughly normal distribution, with a mean $(\mu)$ of 22 years and a standard deviation $(\sigma)$ of 5 years.

Step 2 :We are asked to find the age that defines the lowest 40% of ages. This is a problem of finding the percentile of a normal distribution. The 40th percentile (or the lowest 40% of ages) is the age below which 40% of the observations fall.

Step 3 :We can use the z-score formula to solve this problem. The z-score is the number of standard deviations a particular score is from the mean. In this case, we need to find the z-score that corresponds to the 40th percentile.

Step 4 :Using the z-score formula, we find that the z-score is -0.2533471031357997.

Step 5 :We then use this z-score to find the corresponding age. The formula for this is age = \(\mu + z \times \sigma\). Substituting the given values, we get age = 22 + (-0.2533471031357997) * 5 = 20.733264484321.

Step 6 :This means that the lowest 40% of ages for first occurrence of filing personal taxes is around 20.73 years.

Step 7 :Final Answer: The age that defines the lowest 40% of ages is approximately \(\boxed{20.73}\) years.

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