Suppose a food scientist wants to determine whether two experimental preservatives result in different mean shelf lives for bananas. He treats a simple random sample of 15 bananas with one of the preservatives. He then collects another simple random sample of 20 bananas and treats them with the other preservative. As the bananas age, the food scientist records the shelf life of all bananas in both samples. The food scientist does not know the population standard deviations. What test should the food scientist run in order to determine if the two experimental preservatives result in different mean shelf lives for bananas

The two sample t-test

Step-by-step explanation:

The appropriate test for thus is the two sample t test which is also known as the independent t test. This tests aims at determined whether there is a statistically significant difference between the means in two unrelated groups which in this context are a random sample with one type of preservative and another sample with another type of preservatives.

With this test, the researcher is able to compare the mean shelf lives of the bananas treated with the two different preservatives ... The null hypothesis equalises the two means of the sample while the alternative does otherwise.