Question: On Friday, Wall Street traders were anxiously awaiting the federal government’s release of

numbers on the January increase in nonfarm payrolls. The early consensus estimate among

economists was for a growth of 250,000 new jobs (CNBC, February 3, 2006). However, a

sample of 20 economists taken Thursday afternoon provided a sample mean of 266,000

with a sample standard deviation of 24,000. Financial analysts often call such a sample

mean, based on late-breaking news, the whisper number. Treat the “consensus estimate” as

the population mean. Conduct a hypothesis test to determine whether the whisper number justifies a conclusion of a statistically significant increase in the consensus estimate of economists. Use α = .01 as the level of significance.