Try it on paper first. A hint, the key idea and the worked solution are here when you need them.
A made-up street has households. They keep , , , and pets. A student chooses different households at random and works out the mean number of pets in her sample. There are possible samples. Find the population mean. Find the mean of the possible sample means. How many of the samples have a mean within of the population mean?
A parameter describes the population, and a statistic describes one sample. A statistic changes from sample to sample by chance, and listing every possible sample shows its whole pattern.
Have you tried it?
Work it out on paper first. It is fine to get stuck or make a mistake: that is how we learn. When you are ready, go through the solution one step at a time, and check each step against your own.
Step 1. The population mean. pets.
Step 2. All the samples. The ten pair means, in order, are , , , , , , , , and pets.
Step 3. Their mean. They add up to , so their mean is pets, the population mean.
Step 4. Close samples. The means from to are , , and . That is samples.
Answer: pets, pets and samples.
What it means. Only of the samples land close to the truth, yet the samples miss up and down equally, so on average they are right.
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