Ch AP Ter 1 Thinking About Statistics and Math You have probably heard the terms statistics and data But what do they mean Data is simply bits of information often numbers Each piece of data is known as a data point Statistics are specific numbers calculated from collections of data For example a player’s batting average a statistic is calculated by dividing his number of hits by the total number of times he went up to bat Similarly each home run is one data point The corresponding statistic is the total sum of home runs in the season or in a player’s career Making sense of data and statistics can be confusing at first You might feel like you are looking at a sea of numbers But we can learn to read and understand those numbers as well as we read words 4 21st century skills library
If you follow sports you probably already know something about statistics 5 5 Data Geek
Coaches rely on statistics to figure out which players are best at different things or in different situations The information you learn by studying statistics can be used in many ways It can be used to rank things For example let’s say you’re one of the coaches on a baseball team Maybe you want to place the players on your baseball team in order based on how many times they got on base during the season It can also be used to predict a result If you know your baseball team’s win loss record against a certain team you can predict how likely it is that you will win the next game against them Statistics are a great way to win people over in an argument Perhaps the manager of your baseball team wants to add a new 6 21st century skills library
Math is a part of statistics but there are also other things to consider player To convince the owner it is a good idea the manager might show off the new player’s pitching statistics Data comprehension is about more than just using math to get answers When we complete a math problem it is easy to think Two plus two is four I have the answer Now I’m done With statistics we have to think more carefully about what each number means What are the two things we are adding to another two things Why are we adding them together Things that might not matter in a simple math problem can be very important when dealing with statistics We also have to wonder 7 Data Geek
