MegaMaester

Statistics for Everyday Life · Module 5

Statistics in Society

The first four modules built the ideas and craft of statistics. This module takes them into the wild — the medical results, polls, sports numbers, official figures, and big-data claims that shape public life, and how to read each one wisely.

You will learn to read medical statistics, make sense of polls and elections, understand famous statistical paradoxes, see how data reshaped sports, understand how societies measure themselves, judge big-data claims, and live as an informed statistical citizen.

Lessons
7 lessons
Estimated time
~6-8 hours
Assessment
Module quiz included

Not started yet

Lessons

Lesson 1 · 16 min

Statistics in Medicine and Health

Lesson 2 · 16 min

Reading Polls and Elections

Lesson 3 · 16 min

Statistical Paradoxes and Surprises

Lesson 4 · 16 min

Statistics in Sports and Games

Lesson 5 · 16 min

Official Statistics: Measuring Society

Lesson 6 · 16 min

Statistics in the Age of Big Data

Lesson 7 · 16 min

Statistics for an Informed Life

Check your understanding

Finish the lessons, then test yourself. Your best score is saved on this device. You can also open this quiz on its own page.

Statistics in Society — Module Assessment

14 questions · pass mark 75%

  1. 1.A condition affects about 1 in 1,000 people. A test has 99 percent sensitivity and 99 percent specificity. You test positive. Roughly how likely are you to actually have the condition?
  2. 2.A news story reports that a daily habit "raises your lifetime risk of a rare cancer by 100 percent." The baseline risk is 1 in 20,000. What is the most accurate reading?
  3. 3.The 1936 Literary Digest poll wrongly predicted the presidential result despite roughly 2.4 million responses. The main reason was that:
  4. 4.A poll shows Candidate X at 50 percent and Candidate Y at 47 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 points. What is the best interpretation?
  5. 5.A city reports that Hospital A has a higher overall death rate than Hospital B, yet A has a lower death rate for both mild and severe patients considered separately. What is the most likely explanation?
  6. 6.Abraham Wald examined returning WWII bombers and advised adding armour where the planes showed the fewest bullet holes. What reasoning led to this counterintuitive advice?
  7. 7.A rookie wins Player of the Year with extraordinary numbers, then posts merely solid numbers the next season. What is the most statistically sound interpretation?
  8. 8.How did the early-2000s Oakland Athletics, described in Michael Lewis's Moneyball, compete against far wealthier teams?
  9. 9.In a two-item CPI, bread has a spending weight of 70 percent and petrol 30 percent. If bread rises 4 percent and petrol rises 20 percent, what is measured inflation?
  10. 10.Under the standard international definition, which person is counted as unemployed?
  11. 11.A team tests 1,000 unrelated variables against a purchase outcome using a 5 percent significance threshold, and none truly matter. Roughly how many will look statistically significant by chance?
  12. 12.What is the central lesson of the Google Flu Trends story?
  13. 13.An advertisement says a drug "reduces your risk of stroke by 40 percent." Which checklist question most directly exposes whether this impressive-sounding figure represents a large or a trivial real change?
  14. 14.A friend refuses to believe a large, transparent, peer-reviewed public-health estimate, saying "you can prove anything with statistics." Why is this a failure of statistical literacy rather than an example of it?
Answer every question to submit.