# 8.6: Two Population Means with Known Standard Deviations


Even though this situation is not likely (knowing the population standard deviations is very unlikely), the following example illustrates hypothesis testing for independent means with known population standard deviations. The sampling distribution for the difference between the means is normal in accordance with the central limit theorem. The random variable is $$\overline{X_{1}}-\overline{X_{2}}$$. The normal distribution has the following format:

$\textbf{The standard deviation is:}\nonumber$

$\sqrt{\frac{\left(\sigma_{1}\right)^{2}}{n_{1}}+\frac{\left(\sigma_{2}\right)^{2}}{n_{2}}}\nonumber$

$\textbf{The test statistic (z-score) is:}\nonumber$

$Z_{c}=\frac{\left(\overline{x}_{1}-\overline{x}_{2}\right)-\delta_{0}}{\sqrt{\frac{\left(\sigma_{1}\right)^{2}}{n_{1}}+\frac{\left(\sigma_{2}\right)^{2}}{n_{2}}}}\nonumber$

At the 5% level of significance, from the sample data, there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that the mean age of Democratic senators is greater than the mean age of the Republican senators.

8.6: Two Population Means with Known Standard Deviations is shared under a CC BY license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by .