populations/samples :)

Question 1

what is a population?

Answer 1

a population is everyone or everything that could be involved in an investigation. e.g. when investigating opinions of students in a school the population would be all the students in the school.

Question 2

what is a census?

Answer 2

when you take information from every member of the population.

Question 3

what is a sample?

Answer 3

when you take information from a smaller part of the population. the data taken from the survey is then used to make conclusions about the entire population, so it is important that it represents the population fairly.

Question 4

what is a sampling frame?

Answer 4

a list of all the members of a population. e.g. a class register.

Question 5

what is a sampling unit?

Answer 5

the people/items that are to be sampled. e.g. the students in a school.

Question 6

what is a biased sample?

Answer 6

a sample that doesn’t represent the population fairly.

Question 7

what are the advantages of using a census?

Answer 7

(1) they are unbiased
(2) they are accurate
(3) they take into account the entire population

Question 8

what are the disadvantages of using a census?

Answer 8

(1) they are time consuming
(2) they are expensive
(3) there’s lots of data to manage
(4) it may be difficult to ensure the whole population
is used

Question 9

what are the advantages of using a sample?

Answer 9

(1) they are cheaper
(2) they are quicker to organise
(3) there’s less data to be considered, collected and use.

Question 10

what are the disadvantages of using a sample?

Answer 10

(1) they may be biased
(2) they aren’t entirely representative of the whole population.