Question: A company manufactures ball bearings that are supplied to other companies. The machine that is used to manufacture these ball bearings produces them with a variance of diameters of .025 square millimeter or less. The quality control officer takes a sample of such ball bearings quite often and checks, using confidence intervals and tests of hypotheses, whether or not the variance of these bearings is within .025 square millimeter. If it is not, the machine is stopped and adjusted. A recently taken random sample of 23 ball bearings gave a variance of the diameters equal to .034 square millimeter.
a. Using the 5% significance level, can you conclude that the machine needs an adjustment? Assume that the diameters of all ball bearings have a normal distribution.
b. Construct a 95% confidence interval for the population variance.