The hypothesis which is accepted when the null hypothesis has been rejected is called the alternative hypothesis. It is denoted by or. Whatever we are expecting from the sample data is taken as the alternate hypothesis. “More than 25% people are literate in our country”. We are hoping to get this result from the sample. It will be taken as an alternate hypothesis and null hypothesis will be that 25 % or less than that is literate. To be more specific,  will be 25 % or 1ess are literate and will be more than 25 % are literate. It is written as:
               (25 % or less)        (More than 25 %)
To keep the things simple, we can write H0 in the form of equality as but it is important to write with proper direction of inequality. Thus we write.
In this case thecontains the inequality more than (>). We shall explain later that may be written with inequality less than (<) or not equal (). In general, if the hypothesis about the population parameter is, then H can be written in three different ways.
For  
But this is the simple approach which is allowed for the students. Another way of writing the above hypotheses and is