5. Theo wants to know what percent of students at his school have a computer. Which strategy
for sampling will be more likely to produce a representative sample?
a. Get an alphabetized list of the names of all students in the school, and pick every
tenth student on the list to survey.
b. Send an email to every student asking them if they have a computer, and count the
first 50 surveys that get returned.
Explain your answer.
6. David hosts a podcast and he is curious how much his listeners like his show. He decides to
poll the next 100 listeners that send him fan emails. They don’t all respond, but 94 of the 97
listeners polled said they “loved” his show. What is the most concerning source of bias in this
scenario? Is this an overestimate or underestimate? Explain.
7. A senator wanted to know about how the people in her state felt about internet privacy
issues. She conducted a poll by calling 100 people whose names were randomly sampled from the
phone book. The senator’s office called those numbers until they got a response from all 100
people chosen. The poll showed that 42% of respondents were “very concerned” about internet
privacy. What is the most concerning source of bias in this scenario? Is this an overestimate
or underestimate? Explain.
8. A principal orders t-shirts and wants to check some of them to make sure they were printed
properly. She randomly selects 2 of the 10 boxes of shirts and checks every shirt in those 2
boxes. What type of sampling is this?
FHS Administration wants to determine why students do or do not attend class. They create a
survey and give it to 6 randomly selected classes during 6
th
period. What type of sample is this?
Is it likely to give them useful information? Why or why not? Is any type of bias a concern?
How would you suggest admin choose a sample for this survey?