What Is Statistics?
Statistics involves planning, gathering, organizing, analyzing, and presenting information, with the goal of making an observable determination about the world. In statistics, the information is called data.
A word you’ll hear a lot while working with statistics is observation. An observation is something you can detect with your senses. Examples of observations would be “it’s cold today!” or “the apple is red”. The specific observations are the adjectives “cold” and “red”.
Another word that frequently occurs when talking about statistics is experiment. In an experiment, you generally perform a specific action several times, and note your observations.
The statistics you’ll work with in school often consist of data observations, which are observations connected to numbers.
Example 1
You’re going to write down what everyone in your class eats for lunch every week.
You’ll be performing an experiment.
To get information for your experiment, you’ll have to observe (look at) what everyone in your class eats for lunch. What they eat are your observations.
Examples of observations are “apple”, “salad”, “sandwich”, “yogurt”, and similar things.
Unfortunately, statistics can be used in a way that can trick us humans. Statistics can make things seem different from what they actually are—often totally unintentionally! It is therefore very important that you understand when this is happening.
Think About This
You’re in the house of mirrors in an amusement park with distorting mirrors. Does your reflection look like yourself?
The distorting mirrors are constructed in a way so that your reflection looks different from what you actually look like in reality. Some mirrors make you look wider, other mirrors make you look slimmer. Some mirrors can even make you look wavy!
Even when seeing these strange reflections, you know that nothing has actually happened to your body in reality. In the same way the mirrors alter your looks, statistics can alter how information looks. Sometimes statistics can make things seem different from the truth, so don’t be fooled!
