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ACTIVITY 1
To learn that we must collect information to be able to answer general questions
[LO 5.1]
It is useful to have information about people. For instance, if the government has to decide how many new schools to build and where to build them, then they need to know how many children there are in every region of the country, especially children who are not yet attending schools. The same applies for decisions about building new clinics and hospitals, and so on.
People who want to market a new product will want to know how many people would be interested in buying their product. For this they need to ask questions and obtain statistics.
The professionals who work in this field are called statisticians. It is their job to see that the information that is gathered is the best possible (we will learn more about this later). They then study and manipulate the data so that sensible decisions can be based on them.
The basis of statistics is figures, which are obtained from asking questions. We are going to do some quick research.
The government organises a census from time to time to obtain information about the population. At that time many extra people are employed to gather the details of every person in the country. It usually takes a few years to organise all the information and to publish it. The information is then made public so that it can be used by people who need to plan on the basis of accurate figures.
Important note : Please keep any information that you work on in this section – we will use it again later. As you learn how to work with statistics, we will get more and more information from your data.
| Number of people | Owns a cell phone | Has had cell phone stolen | Has lost cell phone | |
| Learner | ||||
| Class |
2 Work in groups of three or four. Each must write down two sports that they would particularly like to take part in. These sports need not be school sports. For each of the sports, they must say whether they already play it, whether they are members of a team or whether they can’t play it because they don’t have access to facilities and equipment or don’t have access to a coach. Again, fill the information for your group in on the table.
3 Here are some more of the type of questions that statisticians might work on:
3.1 How representative are the learners in a particular school of the population of the area where the school is?
3.2 What are the attitudes of the people living in a certain region to the proclamation of a part of the area as a wildlife preservation area?
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