What parametric test is used to compare means between two groups?

The Student t test is the appropriate parametric test for comparing the means of two groups. This test is specifically designed to determine if there is a statistically significant difference between the means of two independent groups and assumes that the data follows a normal distribution and has equal variances.

In scenarios where you have two groups and want to assess whether their means differ from each other, the t test is the most suitable choice. It works well in cases of small sample sizes and provides a clear way to evaluate differences based on the calculated t statistic and corresponding p-value.

While other tests listed may serve different purposes, they do not provide the same direct comparison of means between two groups. For example, the chi-squared test is used for categorical data to assess how likely it is that an observed distribution is due to chance, while ANOVA is used to compare means across three or more groups, and the Mann-Whitney U test, as a non-parametric alternative, compares ranks rather than means. Therefore, the Student t test is specifically tailored for comparing the means of two independent groups, making it the correct choice in this context.