Problem 35 Medium Difficulty

To predict the outcome of the next congressional election, you take a survey of your friends. Is this a random sample of the voters in your congressional district? Explain why or why not.

Answer

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Video Transcript

this question asks about sampling. It proposes scenario in which you want to know, um, general opinion about the upcoming election. So there's an election coming up and you want to know what the public thinks it asked. Is simple ing your class so several members of your class? Is that a good way of getting an idea of what the election will look like? Well, unfortunately, the answer is no. Here's why in an election, ideally, everyone in the country is voting. So this is the population of the country. To get a what we call a representative sample, you need to sample evenly from the entire population, a record, a representative sample. We'll give you a good idea about, um, what the general population thinks. But here's what happens when you take a sample of just your class. Your class is probably. People who live in the same area, are the same age and certainly are all students. Now. These three things we know correlate two political opinions and thoughts about elections. So when you're sampling a class really what you're doing, I'll draw it in red. Is your sampling from a tiny spot in the population so you might have a good idea about what your class thinks, but you won't have any idea really about what the entire population thinks of the election. So for that reason, it's not a good idea to only sample the class.