Question

You want to find out how sleep deprivation affects motor performance. To study this, you have sleep-deprived subjects (such as parents of newborn babies or night-shift workers) record the number of minutes they sleep each night and take a series of motor performance assessments, with 1 minute being the smallest unit on the scale. Suppose the first subject sleeps 180 minutes. Determine the real limits of 180.

Answer 1

179.5 - 180.5

Explanation:

Time is a continuous variable. The minimum sleep time per night per subject here, is given as 1 minute.

Larger sleep times could be 1.08 minutes, 2.99 minutes, and other continuous/infinite values. Remember there are 60seconds in a minute and in-between seconds, there are milliseconds. So time is a continuous variable.

In this case though, our measurement of time is given in whole number units (integers). Our precision of measurement is 1 unit. We have an observed value of 180 minutes (the first subject's sleep time). The real limits of this value are 179.5 to 180.5