Practice Tests (1-4) and Final Exams
Practice Test 1
1.1: Definitions of Statistics, Probability, and Key Terms
Use the following information to answer the next three exercises. A grocery
store is interested in how much money, on average, their customers spend each
visit in the produce department. Using their store records, they draw a sample of
1,000 visits and calculate each customer’s average spending on produce.
1. Identify the population, sample, parameter, statistic, variable, and data for
this example.
a. population
b. sample
c. parameter
d. statistic
e. variable
f. data
2. What kind of data is “amount of money spent on produce per visit”?
a. qualitative
b. quantitative-continuous
c. quantitative-discrete
3. The study finds that the mean amount spent on produce per visit by the
customers in the sample is ?12.84. This is an example of a:
a. population
b. sample
c. parameter
d. statistic
, e. variable
1.2: Data, Sampling, and Variation in Data and Sampling
Use the following information to answer the next two exercises. A health club is
interested in knowing how many times a typical member uses the club in a
week. They decide to ask every tenth customer on a specified day to complete a
short survey including information about how many times they have visited the
club in the past week.
4. What kind of a sampling design is this?
a. cluster
b. stratified
c. simple random
d. systematic
5. “Number of visits per week” is what kind of data?
a. qualitative
b. quantitative-continuous
c. quantitative-discrete
6. Describe a situation in which you would calculate a parameter, rather than a
statistic.
7. The U.S. federal government conducts a survey of high school seniors
concerning their plans for future education and employment. One question asks
whether they are planning to attend a four-year college or university in the
following year. Fifty percent answer yes to this question; that fifty percent is a:
a. parameter
b. statistic
, c. variable
d. data
8. Imagine that the U.S. federal government had the means to survey all high
school seniors in the U.S. concerning their plans for future education and
employment, and found that 50 percent were planning to attend a 4-year college
or university in the following year. This 50 percent is an example of a:
a. parameter
b. statistic
c. variable
d. data
Use the following information to answer the next three exercises. A survey of a
random sample of 100 nurses working at a large hospital asked how many years
they had been working in the profession. Their answers are summarized in the
following (incomplete) table.
9. Fill in the blanks in the table and round your answers to two decimal places
for the Relative Frequency and Cumulative Relative Frequency cells.
# of years Frequency Relative Frequency Cumulative Relative Frequency
<5 25
5–10 30
> 10 empty
10. What proportion of nurses have five or more years of experience?
, 11. What proportion of nurses have ten or fewer years of experience?
12. Describe how you might draw a random sample of 30 students from a
lecture class of 200 students.
13. Describe how you might draw a stratified sample of students from a college,
where the strata are the students’ class standing (freshman, sophomore, junior,
or senior).
14. A manager wants to draw a sample, without replacement, of 30 employees
from a workforce of 150. Describe how the chance of being selected will
change over the course of drawing the sample.
15. The manager of a department store decides to measure employee
satisfaction by selecting four departments at random, and conducting interviews
with all the employees in those four departments. What type of survey design is
this?
a. cluster
b. stratified
c. simple random
d. systematic
16. A popular American television sports program conducts a poll of viewers to
see which team they believe will win the NFL (National Football League)
championship this year. Viewers vote by calling a number displayed on the
television screen and telling the operator which team they think will win. Do
you think that those who participate in this poll are representative of all football
fans in America?
17. Two researchers studying vaccination rates independently draw samples of
50 children, ages 3–18 months, from a large urban area, and determine if they
are up to date on their vaccinations. One researcher finds that 84 percent of the
children in her sample are up to date, and the other finds that 86 percent in his
sample are up to date. Assuming both followed proper sampling procedures and
did their calculations correctly, what is a likely explanation for this
discrepancy?
18. A high school increased the length of the school day from 6.5 to 7.5 hours.
Students who wished to attend this high school were required to sign contracts
pledging to put forth their best effort on their school work and to obey the