Question Video: Distinguishing between Population and Sample Mathematics • Third Year of Preparatory School

Video Transcript

Which of the following data sets would be suitable to collect information about the quantity of oil available in different locations in the US? Samples or mass population?

We need to think about what samples and mass population means. When we’re talking about data, samples contain a subset of the population. And the mass population contains all members of the specified group. And that means if you are going to use mass population about oil in different locations in the US, you’d have to sample every location in the US. This is really not feasible for a study like this.

This type of research is usually done by samples, taking a subset of the population, taking some of the locations, and analyzing those.