A medical researcher wishes to investigate the relationship between hours exercised and weight lost. The researcher randomly samples 50 people on an exercise program and asks them to report how many hours they have exercised on average over the last 6 weeks and how many pounds they have lost. The researcher runs a correlation and finds a test statistic of .34. Knowing that the critical value is .279, what should the researcher conclude

The researcher will conclude that there is a correlation between the number of hours worked out and the amount of pounds lost by people on the exercise program

Step-by-step explanation:

Here, we want to state what the conclusion of the researcher should be:

From the last part of the question, we can see that the test statistic is greater than the critical value

So what do we do in a case like this?

We can see that the researcher is trying to see if there is a correlation between hours worked out and the number of pounds lost over a specific period of time.

Now, let us form the null hypothesis;

The null hypothesis here H0 is that we do not have a correlation between number of hours spent working out and the amount of pounds lost

The alternative hypothesis here H1 is that there is a correlation between the number of hours spent working out and the amount of pounds lost

Since we have the value of the test statistic greater than the critical value, we reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis

So therefore, the researcher will conclude that there is a correlation between the number of hours worked out and the amount of pounds lost by people on the exercise program