ENG: Statistics Chapter 1: Main Points

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What is statistics?

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Statistics is the science and art of collecting, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from data.

Front

What does a data set contain?

Back

A data set contains information about a number of individuals, which may be people, animals, or things.

Front

What is a variable in statistics?

Back

A variable describes some characteristic of an individual, such as a person’s height, hair color, or salary.

Front

What is a categorical variable?

Back

A categorical variable takes values that are labels, placing each individual into one of several groups, such as hair color or birth month.

Front

What is a quantitative variable?

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A quantitative variable has numerical values that count or measure some characteristic of each individual, such as number of family members or height in centimeters.

Front

What does the distribution of a variable describe?

Back

The distribution of a variable describes what values the variable takes and how often it takes them.

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How can you summarize the distribution of a variable?

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You can use a frequency table or a relative frequency table to quickly summarize the distribution of a variable.

Front

How can you display the distribution of a categorical variable?

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Bar charts and pie charts can be used to display the distribution of a categorical variable.

Front

What should you be cautious of when interpreting graphs?

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Beware of graphs that mislead the eye, such as those with distorted scales or those that replace bars with pictures whose height and width both change.

Front

How can you display the distribution of a quantitative variable?

Back

You can use a dotplot, stemplot, or histogram to show the distribution of a quantitative variable.