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Question from Amirul, a student:

Recently I'm proposing my research question to my teacher for my extended essay. I'm an IB student.
My research question is regarding the estimation of human in buying trousers through reference of neck. What does the relation between the diameter of the neck and the diameter of the waist?
I want to see how far does the estimation theory is true for different type of people with different BMI(body mass index)..

But teacher said that it is golden ratio...so nothing interesting... =(
really??? But i search on net.... state that my idea seems do not have any relation with the golden ratio so far..... i just want ask you... am I able to perform in my extended essay if i continue with this research question?

Amirul,

Firstly, it is almost certainly not Golden Ratio. Very few things are (some are ratios of adjacent Fibonacci numbers which is a different story.)

Secondly, if your teacher thinks it is, you would seem to have a natural null hypothesis. You could then gather data (the more the better, and fix your sample size ahead of time) and test the hypothesis.
You will have to decide what test to use [can an approximately normal distribution be expected? if not, a nonparametric test may be better than Student's t] Presumably you would be "binning' the data based on BMI and doing separate tests on each bin.

Good Hunting!
RD

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