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gayathri
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ian7777
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toddmartin
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First ot all i dont think its a GMAT question.. we are not supposed to know the properties of normal distribution..

i agree with gmatnub's approach .. the answer should be 2.5/18.5 actually 2.2/18 to be more accurate

closest option is B 1/8.
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I haven't even read the question (but I trust Durgesh :) ), but you do not need to know anything about the properties of a normal distribution for the GMAT- and you definitely don't need to know what percentage of data points fall within one or two standard deviations in a normally distributed set of data.
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There is no way to answer this question without consulting a stats table. Since that's impossible during a GMAT, it's not a realistic question. I know that the source gives an OA of B for this question, but that is the wrong answer. While you don't need to know this for the GMAT, when data is normally distributed, approximately 68.3% of values are within one standard deviation of the mean, and approximately 95.4% are within two standard deviations of the mean. If you round these values off to 68% and 95%, you'll get the answer given by the source. This rounding affects the answer, however; if you use exact values, you'll find that the correct answer to this question is closer to 1/8 than to 1/9. It's a very poorly designed question, and completely out of the scope of GMAT statistics, so it's best to ignore this question (and similar questions from the same source) and move on to better materials.
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