MATH 124 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: San Francisco State University, Drawa
Document Summary
You stir the pot with the spoon, take a little bit and taste it. Then you draw a conclusion about the contents of the whole pot, even if you haven"t tasted everything. If you take the sample in an unbiased manner (for example, you don"t just taste the tastiest ingredients), you can get a clear idea of the taste of the stew without having to eat it all. In statistics the samples are taken exactly the same way. This subset of the population is called the sample. Although selecting a sample may seem like a simple matter, it is not. How you select a sample from the population can make the difference between getting correct results and ending up with a pile of garbage. For example, let"s say you want a sample of what teenagers think about their time on the internet.
