A quick survey of peanut butter prices had standard deviation and mean of $\$ 0.26$ and $\$ 3.68$, respectively. Compute the area for a peanut butter jar costing less than $\$ 3.50$.

Step 1 ：Identify the given values: the mean (\(\mu\)) is $3.68, the standard deviation (\(\sigma\)) is $0.26, and the value we are interested in (X) is $3.50.

Step 2 ：Calculate the z-score using the formula Z = (X - \(\mu\)) / \(\sigma\). Substituting the given values into the formula, we get Z = ($3.50 - $3.68) / $0.26 = -0.69 (rounded to two decimal places).

Step 3 ：Find the area to the left of the z-score. The area to the left of the z-score in a standard normal distribution represents the probability that a value is less than X. Looking up a z-score of -0.69 in the z-table, we find that the area to the left is approximately 0.2451.

Step 4 ：Check the result. The result is less than 0.5 (or 50%), which makes sense because $3.50 is less than the mean price of $3.68. Therefore, we would expect less than half of the jars to cost less than $3.50.

Step 5 ：\(\boxed{24.51\%}\) is the final answer, which is the probability that a jar of peanut butter costs less than $3.50.