A food-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 3000 randomly selected adult Americans from its national consumer panel and found that 1690 prefer spicy flavoring, yielding the following statistics.

Sample size Sample count Sample proportion z-Statistic Standard error Probability value
n x p z SE P-value
3000 1690 0.560 2.026 0.010 0.021

Use a right-tailed hypothesis test for this one-sample z-test of a proportion to determine whether the difference between 0.560 and 0.54 is statistically significant at a significance level of 0.025.

Which of the following statements is correct?

a. The difference is not statistically significant because the difference between 0.560 and 0.54 is very small.
b. The difference is not statistically significant at a level of 0.025 because the P-value is not less than 0.025.
c. The difference is statistically significant at a level of 0.025 because the P-value is less than 0.025.
d. The difference is not statistically significant at a level of 0.025 because the P-value is less than 0.025.
e. The difference is statistically significant at a level of 0.02 because the P-value is less than 0.02.