Errata in
As with any book, I expect there will be some errors. On this page, I will post any errors that I find or that teachers report to me. If you find an answer/problem/example confusing, look here first.
I do report these errors to the publishing company. So, if you see something listed as an error here that is no longer an error in what you're seeing, that's means they have corrected it and that's great!
E-book | Applets | Minitab Manual | Self Quizzes | Study Guide| EESEE Case Studies
Sept 15, 2007: Here is a direct link to the publisher's list of errata. (Here's a download of that page on Sept. 15, 2007)
E-book -
Sept. 15, 2007 : Overall: Doesn't include most of the material in the paper book before Chapter and after Chapter 25. The only part of that included is the tables in the e-book list at the end. Missing are the essay on statistical thinking at the beginning and the follow-up at the end, the footnotes to all the chapters and, at the beginning, the notes to instructors, notes to students, and index of applications.
Chapter 2. Problem 5. (Nov. 23, 2007) The graphs given for part b. are not correct. (They are for the next problem.)
Chapter 2. Problems 2.37 and 2.38. (August 5, 2007) The icons for the datasets for these two problems are reversed. So, if you want to use the icons to open the datasets, use the icons for 2.38 to open the dataset for 2.37 and vice versa. Or, better yet, use the method your instructor described about how to open the datasets WITHOUT using the icons. That's a good skill to know, since, in the real world, data don't come to you like this (with an icon to click on.)
Chapter 4. 35a. (Sept 13, 2006 and Sept. 15, 2007) Since our text doesn't discuss "nominal scale" this is a poorly worded answer for us. A better answer would be, "Because gender is not a quantitative variable, it is not appropriate to compute the correlation between gender and any other variable. (If you code gender as 0 and 1, since those are numbers, you could get software to compute a correlation coefficient for you, but it would have no meaning.) "
Chapter 4. 41.( Sept 13, 2006 and again Sept 15, 2007) There are no icons to call up the software with the data already loaded. But there is data for this problem that you need to analyze. (That must be a mistake - I'm sure they intended to put a link there so that you can do it like that.) You can call up the software from another problem, delete the data from that problem, and then type in these data values. Or you can use the datafile from the textbook CD.
Chapter 5, problem 5b and other problems with r-squared in the answer. (May 13, 2007) The answers which include r-squared have some typographical problem and the squared isn't showing. So when the answer to 5.5b says r = 0.0182, it really means that r-squared is 0.0182.
Chapter 5 problem 7, part b. (Sept. 21, 2006 and again Sept 15, 2007) Incorrect answer. The answer should say, "No, because the relationship is curved, not linear." The answer in StatsPortal is for 5.9 part b.
Chapter 5, problem 7, part c. (Oct. 17, 2006 and again Sept. 15, 2007) Incorrect answer in StatsPortal. The answer in StatsPortal is for 5.9 part c. The brief answer in the back of the book is correct. More details here.
Chapter 4 and 5. (Sept. 15, 2007) The "Two Variable Statistical Calculator" applet claims to have the textbook data in it, but it is numbered from the old edition of the textbook. The first couple of datasets have the same number as they had in the old edition, but most of the rest do not. You can find the applet with the correct dataset on the textbook website that the publisher provides free at http://bcs.whfreeman.com/bps4e/ . Follow the link in the two-column list toward the bottom of the page to Statistical Applets and then to the Two-Variable Statistical Calculator.
Chapter 7 Data (Feb. 8, 2008). The datafile links for problems 17, 18, and 40 (and probably others) don't work. That's because the datafiles are labeled by the table name and the person who made the e-book links didn't know that. You can find the data in StatsPortal under Resources > Datasets > Chapter 7. Go to the end of the list and choose the appropriate table and use the data there. Below is the listing I had in the earlier errata sheets about this.
Chapter 8. (Sept. 15, 2007.) There are two different places to look at the tables in the e-book. Table B in one of them is only half of what is needed. It is better to use the ones which appear in the e-book at the end of all the chapter listings. Those look exactly like the tables in the back of the printed book and are the ones used by the authors when they wrote the book and answer keys. The tables under "Resources > Tables and Formulas" are briefer. They only have half as many lines as Table B in the textbook and do not have the illustrations at the top of the pages for Tables A, C, D, E, and F. Here's a copy of the paper textbook table B.
Chapter 8. Exercise 8.13 (Sept. 15, 2007) The answer to 8.13 in the e-book says to look at a comment on page 59 about using Table B, and has a link to page 59. But I don't think there is anything on page 59 about Table B. So ignore this comment about looking on page 59.
Chapter 9. Exercise 9.5. (Sept. 15, 2007) The answer to 9.5 in the e-book says to look at a comment on page 59 about using Table B, and has a link to page 59. But I don't think there is anything on page 59 about Table B. So ignore this comment about looking on page 59.
Chapter 18. Section on "The one-sample t confidence interval" (Oct. 29, 2007). The second line of this section doesn't have the square roots over the n's in the denominators that should be there. It should say "sigma / square root of n" and "s / square root of n."
Chapter 23. (April 20, 2007) The data files for almost all the problems in this chapter have summary data, which is a fine thing. But the summary data is provided in the wrong form for MINITAB to use it as given. You have to rearrange it. And the MINITAB Manual doesn't emphasize that. I suppose that, strictly speaking, this is not an error, but it is certainly misleading for the data to be provided in this manner without some warning to the students about the need to edit it heavily before using it.
(Sept 15, 2007) is not simply not linked at all. So a student has to know to go back to 23.1 to find the dataset. But the dataset for 23.2 has the same difficulty as described below. So the difficulty identified last April has been avoided for problem 23.3, but is still a difficulty for other problems.
(April 20, 2007) For example, for problem 23.03, the provided
dataset has
|
. |
C1 |
C2 |
C3 |
|
|
grade |
activity |
count |
|
1 |
ABC |
less2 |
11 |
|
2 |
ABC |
2to12 |
68 |
|
3 |
ABC |
more12 |
3 |
|
4 |
DF |
less2 |
9 |
|
5 |
DF |
2to12 |
23 |
|
6 |
DF |
more12 |
5 |
But, for MINITAB to compute the chi-squared
test computations, you must rearrange the worksheet to have
|
. |
C1 |
C2 |
C3 |
C4 |
|
. |
. |
less2 |
2to12 |
more12 |
|
1 |
ABC |
11 |
68 |
3 |
|
2 |
DF |
9 |
23 |
5 |
Chapter 23 problem 29 (Sept. 15, 2007) MINITAB dataset has the same difficulty as described above. The Crunch-It icon doesn't pull up a dataset.
Chapter 23, problem 30 (Sept. 15, 2007) No icons at all for the data.
Chapter 23, problem 31 (Sept. 15, 2007) Same difficulty as identified for problem 29 above.
To students: For the problems in this chapter, you should plan on typing in the data in the form needed.
1. (Sept. 15, 2007) The datasets pre-loaded into the Two Variable Statistical Calculator Applet are not all the same datasets as in our edition of the text. They are from the previous edition of the text, and while some are the same, they are not all the same. However, they are still very good datasets to use to explore correlation and regression. Use them. Look at the titles in words to see whether those titles in words match those of our text. (For instance, "Bird colonies", "Icicles", and "Degree days and gas consumption" do.) And feel free to explore all this data even when it is different from that in our text. These are good illustrations.
2. (Oct. 9, 2007) A student had trouble running the applet in StatsTutor and asked for help. Another student offered some very useful help that I hadn't seen anywhere before.
1. (Sept. 7, 2006 and Sept. 15, 2007) The version of Chapter 5 I can see does not have the correct problems. So use the statements of the problems in the textbook rather than the MINITAB Manual.
Chapter 2. (Sept. 7, 2006 and Sept. 15, 2007) Also may not have the correct problems at the end. Use textbook.
Chapter 4, problem 8. (Sept 11, 2006 and Sept. 15, 2007) Inappropriately copied from the book. They blended together parts (b) and (c) which is confusing. Ignore all the statements about finding the correlation by hand, which is part b in the text. While that's a fine thing to do, you don't use MINITAB to help you with that. The instructions on using MINITAB here should be in part (c) of the problem.
Sept 15, 2007: See comment below, except that I made a mistake - I meant to say that in 8 & 9 really, datasets are NOT needed. On this date I have only checked in the beginning of Ch. 8 in the e-book and MINITAB Manual, but nothing has changed there, so I presume it hasn't changed in the rest of this.
Feb. 19, 2007: Chapters 8, 9 (maybe 10, 12, 13) No datasets are shown in the e-book, and no datasets are in the zip file of datasets I downloaded for the text last fall. But the MINITAB Manual refers to there being datasets. In chs. 8 and 9, datasets are really needed, so I'd deal with this just by deleting the reference to the datasets in the MINITAB Manual.
Chapter 1, question 2. (Jan. 17, 2008) There is a misprint. I believe that choice (a) should say "The price of the commodity changed from Month 1 to Month 60 by $7." Notice that is not the correct answer.
No errors identified at this time.
(Jan. 15, 2007 and Sept. 15, 2007) I know that these are quite interesting. For the first few of them, the MINITAB dataset link doesn't work, but the text file dataset link does. So you'll have to copy and paste the data into your software.
Last updated February 8, 2008 . Mary Parker