Heres a question that is a little confusing.
A statistically minded athlete has evaluated her 400m efforts. She has noticed that the date shows a bell shaped distribution with a mean of 65.2 seconds and a standard deviation of 1.3If she runs a time of 66.8 seconds, which of the following statements is closest to summarising her effort?A. This time is in the top 16% of her efforts.
B. This time is in the bottom 16% of her efforts.
C. This time is close to the average of her efforts.
D. This time is in the top 2% of her efforts.
E. This time is in the bottom 2% of her efforts.
Now, at first glance it doesn't appear to difficult.
Her z score can be calculated to be

Now this would place her result in the highest 16%, so we can eliminate C,D,E.
BUT, my question is, because it is a race, wouldn't this be in her WORST 16% of efforts considering the aim of a race is to run as quickly(lowest time) as possible, as opposed to most questions(eg. lengths of a nail)? She ran ABOVE the mean, hence would make sense for this to be a 'bad' run and be in the worst 16%.
I eventually put
A which was given as the correct answer in the solutions but I'm sort of uncertain.
What do other people think?