A Researcher Believes a New Diet Should Improve Weight Gain $\alpha$

Multiple Choice

A researcher believes a new diet should improve weight gain. To test his hypothesis a random sample of 10 people on the old diet and an independent random sample of 10 people on the new diet were selected. The selected people on the old diet gain an average of 5 pounds with a standard deviation of 2 pounds, while the average gain for selected people on the new diet was 8 pounds with a standard deviation of 1.5 pounds. Assume that the values are normally distributed in each population and that the population variances are approximately equal. Using $\alpha$ = 0.05, the observed t value for this test is ___.

A) -1.96
B) -1.645
C) -2.100
D) -3.79
E) -1.734