Assume that human body temperatures are normally distributed with a mean of 98.18°F and a standard deviation of 0.64°F.
a. A hospital uses 100.6°F as the lowest temperature considered to be a fever. What percentage of normal and healthy persons would be considered to have a fever? Does this percentage suggest that a cutoff of 100.6°F is appropriate?
b. Physicians want to select a minimum temperature for requiring further medical tests. What should that temperature be, if we want only 5.0% of healthy people to exceed it? (Such a result is a false positive, meaning that the test result is positive, but the subject is not really sick.)