The manager of the Millcreek Mall wants to know the mean age of the people who shop at the mall and the stores in which they typically shop. Dennis has been put in charge of collecting data for the Millcreek Mall. He decides to interview 100 people one Saturday because it is the mall’s busiest shopping day.

What is the population for this situation?

A. All of the people who shop at Millcreek Mall
B. The 100 shoppers that Dennis interviews
C. All of the women who shop at the mall
D. All of the men who shop at the mall
What is the sample?

A. All of the people who shop at Millcreek Mall
B. The 100 shoppers that Dennis interviews
C. All of the women who shop at the mall
D. All of the men who shop at the mall

When Dennis calculates the mean age of the people who shop at the mall, will he be calculating a parameter or a statistic?

A.Parameter
B.Statistic

In this case, the mean age of people who shop at the mall is being investigated and therefore all of the people who shop at the mall are the population.

A sample is a group of representative individuals chosen from the population to be studied to investigate some aspect of the population;

A sample is usually taken because studying or testing every individual would be problematic and not generally neccesary;

In this case, the sample would be the hundred shoppers chosen to be interviewed.

A parameter and (test) statistic are almost the same thing, but a parameter is the value (or range of values) of some characteristic of the whole population, whilst a statistic is the value (or range of values) of some characteristic of just a sample of the population.