Afood-research and consulting firm reported in 2013 that 54% of americans prefer hot or spicy foods and sauces (technomic inc., 2013). suppose that a condiment company is considering expansion of its dipping sauce product line with a new spicy flavor. the company requested its marketing research vendor to conduct a larger-scale study to test whether consumer taste preference for spicy flavoring has increased since 2013

the marketing research vendor surveyed 2430 randomly selected adult americans from its national consumer panel and found that 1354 prefer spicy flavoring, yielding the following statistics.

samplesamplesamplez-statisticstanda rd errorprobabilityvalue
size(n)count(x)proportion(p)(z)sep- value
243013540.5571.7010.0100.044

use a right-tailed hypothesis test for this one-sample z-test of a proportion to determine whether the difference between 0.557 and 0.54 is statistically significant at a significance level of 0.05. which of the following statements is correct?
a. the difference is not statistically significant at a level of 0.05 because the p-value is less than 0.05.
b. the difference is statistically significant at a level of 0.05 because the p-value is less than 0.05.
c. the difference is statistically significant at a level of 0.02 because the p-value is less than 0.02.
d. the difference is not statistically significant at a level of 0.05 because the p-value is not less than 0.05.
e. the difference is not statistically significant because the difference between 0.557 and 0.54 is very small.