Chapter 18
Statistics and Probability
Statistics is the mathematics of real-world events. In statistics, you analyze data sets — information measured from actual events — using a variety of tools. Probability measures the likelihood of an event whose outcome is unknown. Calculating probability rests upon ordered methods of counting possible outcomes of events. In this section, you solve problems in both statistics and probability.
The Problems You’ll Work On
Here are the main skills you practice in the following problems.
Finding the mean, median, and mode of a data set
Calculating a weighted mean
Counting independent and dependent events
Deciding the probability of an event
What to Watch Out For
Here are some tips for calculating statistics and probability in the problems that follow:
When a question asks for the average without specifying which type, calculate the mean using the following formula: .
To find the median, rank all values in the data set from least to greatest ...
