Survival times of 80 silkworm larvae after poisoning

Samples from a distribution such as a normal distribution can be used to help assess whether skewness, clusters or outliers in a real data set could have appeared by chance.

Select random samples (from a normal distn with the same mean and sd as the actual strength data).

The random samples often appear as skew as the real data, so there is no evidence that survival time has a skew distribution.


Silkworms must be killed after spinning their cocoons since the silk is damaged when the moths break free. Heat is often used to kill the caterpillars, but researchers performed experiments to investigate the toxic action of arsenic. As part of their research, the survival time of fourth-instar silkworm larvae weighing between 0.41 and 0.45 grams was examined after they were given 0.10 mg of sodium arsenate per gram of body weight.