Buford, the farm hand, is preparing feed for the animals. He wants to mix the contents of a bag containing 50% corn with one containing 90% corn to obtain a 30-pound bag containing 80% corn. How many pounds of the 50% bag should he use? (Write your answer as a decimal.)

question:

could we have options?

you didn't post any answer choices, so its not 100% clear what your teacher is looking for

however, log(15/7) is equivalent to log(15) - log(7)

i'm using the rule log(x/y) = log(x) - log(y)

irst, find the z score of a score of 80. this is given by the formula z = (x-u)/o, where x is the score, u is the mean, and o is the standard deviation. this gives

z = (80-78)/12 = 1/6 = .1667

now, find what percentile a z score of 1/6 correlates to in the normal distribution.

a z score of 1/6 = .1667 is equivalent to the 56.36th percentile of the distribution. so the probability a score is over this is 1-.5636 = .4364

the mean of a sample mean is equal to the original mean. however, the standard deviation of a sample mean is equal to the original standard deviation divided by the square root of n (sample size). so the new standard deviation is 12/sqrt(16) = 3.

the new z score is 80-78/3 = 2/3 = .667. this is equivalent to the 74.86th percentile. so the probability that the mean will be greater than this score is 1-.7486 = .2514.