Q1.
Which of the following are statistical questions? (a) What is the price of a tennis ball in India? (b) How old are the dogs that live on this street? (c) What fraction of the students in your class like walking up a hill? (d) Do you like reading? (e) Approximately how many bricks are in this wall? (f) Who was the best bowler in the match yesterday? (g) What was the rainfall pattern in Barmer last year?
Answer
A question is a statistical question if you must collect data to answer it, and if the answer is expected to vary from case to case.
| Question | Statistical? | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| (a) Price of a tennis ball in India | Yes | The price is not the same in every shop or every city. You would collect prices and then summarise them. |
| (b) How old are the dogs on this street? | Yes | The dogs are of different ages. You collect the ages and describe them. |
| (c) What fraction of the class likes walking up a hill? | Yes | You must ask every student and count. The answer is a proportion found from data. |
| (d) Do you like reading? | No | This is asked of one person and has one answer, yes or no. Nothing varies, so no data is collected. |
| (e) Approximately how many bricks are in this wall? | No | One particular wall has one fixed number of bricks. Estimating is not the same as collecting data that varies. |
| (f) Who was the best bowler in the match yesterday? | Yes | To answer it you must look at wickets, runs given and overs bowled for each bowler — that is data, and people may still disagree on how to combine it. |
| (g) What was the rainfall pattern in Barmer last year? | Yes | Rainfall changes from month to month. You need the whole year's readings to describe a pattern. |
Why it happens: the test is not whether the question is hard. It is whether the answer varies. "Do you like reading?" has one answer for one person. But "What fraction of the class likes reading?" varies from class to class, so it becomes statistical.
Careful with (f): "best bowler" is not defined by the data alone. Two people may collect the same figures and still choose different bowlers. It is a statistical question, but it does not have one single correct answer.