Just as statistics are used in sports, they are also used in everyday life. When you watch a weather forecast and they talk about a certain percent chance of a weather condition occurring, they are using statistics.

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When you hear about the probability that someone will win an election, you are being given statistics. When you hear the results of a survey, you are hearing statistics. Statistics are a part of everyday life, and it would be difficult to go about our daily business without them!

Canada 2019 Federal Election, courtesy of Gage and Lokal Profil, CC BY-SA 2.5

People can also use statistics to predict such things as how many people will attend an event or how much of a product to bring into a store based on how that product has sold in the past.

For example, if you were in charge of ordering milk for a grocery store and knew that on a long weekend you sold twice the amount of milk as you did on a regular weekend, you would order twice the amount of milk.

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Another use for probability is the lottery. If you know the number of tickets sold, you can calculate your chance of actually winning the main prize.

Let's say that 400,000 tickets were purchased for a draw and you had purchased one ticket. Your chances of winning are:

Your odds of winning the lottery are not very good, and that is only on 400,000 tickets being sold! Can you imagine how poor they are if over one million tickets were sold? However, probability is an exciting concept and people love to play games based on their chances, or their probability, of winning points or even money.

  Self-check!