Unit 6: Statistics

During the lead up to a major election you will often hear about the percentage of votes different candidates are expected to receive. It is far too expensive and time-consuming for a media company to ask every eligible citizen who they plan to vote for every few days, so how do they come up with the percentages?

Pollsters, scientists, advertisers, sports enthusiasts, and many others can make predictions about a large group by checking just a small portion of the group, using statistics. In this unit, you will learn how to make predictions using a given set of data and you will learn how different sets of data can be compared.

Lesson 6.1: Distributions and Standard Deviation

Interpreting data directly from a table can be difficult. Consider the table below, which shows the net worth of 92 billionaires in 2012. It is hard to get a feel for this data by just looking at it. Questions like "is someone worth 44.0 billion typical of this data set?" or "in what range do most of the billionaires lie?" are difficult to answer without using some method of sorting the data.