Ans: To my understanding, statistics is a count or comparison of different types of the same things, for example, we could compare the difference in number between the number of people who take public transport to the number of people who take cars to work or school. It is the comparison or measurements always involving numbers, statistics are displayed in graphs, sometime with percentage, fractions, degrees or just the values themselves.
Statistics actually cover everything, around the world, population, food, housing, money and stocks are some.
In chapter 16, I learnt how to group statistics, that is by graphs, we practiced it by making graphs out of different sets of data. We were taught to group them into different types of graphs or charts for example, bar graphs, pie charts, histograms and line graphs.
Statistics are used in elections for example during polling day, the number of votes were compared between the groups and people participating in the election. People use statistics to compare the favorite stuff in Singapore and other countries too. They even use statistics to group between the different age groups.
I use graphs to record down my daily expenditure and I use graphs to group my money between different sections. I also use statistics to group the things I like, for example from my favorites to my most hated. When people pay bills, they also use graphs and charts. We even use statistics in daily life such as in school, during surveys, we may want to go around asking people what they like and other things, then we would want to group the data into a chart or graph to organize it more. Statistics is also used in national examinations for example the Primary School Leaving Examination, the Cambridge O Levels Examination and the Cambridge A Levels Examination. Statistics is applied there as only a certain percentage of people can get As, so they use a cumulative curve to determine the number of students who can get an A. For example, if the government only wanted 10% of the students in Singapore to get As, but 50% of all the students got As, the government will move the benchmark to get an A higher, so that less pupils will get As, meeting the 10% requirement.
Statistics are widely used in all newspapers, they use statistics for almost all articles. They may use statistics to report on how many seats the People’s Action Party won in the general election. They also use statistics to report how people have increasingly started using social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The graph shows that during 2009, 37% of people in the world were using Facebook and only 6% were using Twitter. Myspace has 24% of the world using it and for Bebo, 7%.
Sometimes, statistics are not always 100% true, if the government had a really bad situation like a major recession, and if he did not want the people to get too worried over this recession, they may twist the statistics to make the situation look better, hence the people will not worry as much.
(II) Learning Experience
Ans: I feel that my group works well together, as we each did our roles by analyzing our own individual data, we all contributed to being able to complete the performance task in time, we all also contributed to the way we gather our data. The format we gather it in. I hope that all of us will be able to score well for this performance task as it is 20% of our whole year, and we all contributed significantly.
Our group's strength was that we were all able to cooperate together and we had no arguments or fights, making it a lot easier for us to complete the performance task faster and to a better quality.
My roles were to merge the group's data together, and to also help design the poster.
I feel that we actually did not really face any challenges except for how to fit all the information into the poster as it was only A3 size.
I think that in future, it is still possible to improve, but I feel that our group was good enough for me and we were very cooperative.
