NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF LESOTHO

DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS AND DEMOGRAPHY

ST1311 -INTRODUCTION TO STATISTICS 1 –TUTORIAL 1

1. What is statistics?
2. Why is it important to study statistics?
3. What are the limitations of statistics?
4. In which areas can you apply statistics? How?
5. List all the basic statistical concepts that you know. Give a definition
of each concept.
6. Define a census, outlining its advantages and disadvantages.
7. a) Discuss the two fields of statistic.
b) A researcher is interested in the performance of people in a
workshop. She interviewed five people sitting in the back row to get a
report on how they performed in their last test and concluded that all
the people in the workshop performed extremely well. From the
information given;
i) What are the variable(s) of interest?
ii) What is the sample in the study?
iii) Is the variable discrete or continuous?
iv) Are the results obtained by the researcher descriptive or
inferential?
8. A manufacturer of computer chips claims that less than 10% of its
products are defective. When 1,000 chips were drawn from a large
production, 7.5% were found to be defective.
i) Identify the population of interest.
ii) Identify the sample.
iii) Identify the parameter.
iv) Identify the statistics.
v) Does the value 10% refer to the parameter or to the statistic?
vi) Is the value 7.5% a parameter or a statistic?

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9. Determine whether the set of data below is qualitative or quantitative,
discrete or continuous. Also identify the level of measurement for
each.
a) Years covered in American history: 1776 – 1876.
b) Annual income of students in a statistics class: M0 – M6,000.
c) Course grades in any course: A, B, C, D, E, F,
d) Student gender: male, female
10. Identify the scale/level of measurement for each of the following:
e) Exam score (lowest, average, highest).
f) Color of an eye (black, brown).
g) Distance in kilometres travelled by Tsepiso.
h) Differences in distance travelled by two different students.
11. The following data represent 500 families living in an area.
4652 3819 8431 2150 2352 2472 0043 3488
9031 7617 1220 4129 7148 1943 4890 1749
2030 2327 7353 6007 9410 9179 2722 8445
0641 1489 0828 0385 8488 0422 7209 4950
a) Using the attached extract from a table of random numbers, select
a sample of 15 families to find out the standard of living of those
families in that area. Start from the third row and move from left to
right.
b) A student organisation is interested in estimating the proportion of
students who favour a mandatory “pass-fail” grading policy for
elective courses. A list of names and addresses of the 645 students
enrolled during the current quarter is available from the registrar’s
office. Using three-digit random numbers in row 10 of Appendix 1
and moving across the row from left to right, identify the first 10
students who would be selected.
c) A sample of 50 students is to be drawn from a population
consisting of 500 students belong to two institutions, National
Health Training College (NHTC) and Lesotho College of Education
(LCE). The number of students from NHTC is 300 and the number
of students from LEC is 200.

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 i) How large a sample must be taken from each institution?
ii) What percentage of students will come from each institution?
d) If you were to use systematic sampling procedure in c) above, what
would be the sampling interval, k?
e) An advertising firm, interested in determining how much to
emphasize television advertising in a certain county, decides to
conduct a sample survey to estimate the average number of hours
each week that households within that county watch television.
The county has two towns, A and B, and a rural area C. Town A is
built around a factory and most households contain factory
workers with school-aged children. Town B contains mainly
retirees and the rural area C are mainly farmers.

There are 155 households in town A, 62 in town B and 93 in the rural

i) If a stratified random sample is to be taken based on these

ii) How many households should be chosen from each subgroup if

12. The following U.S market shares for 2015 retail car sales have
been reported.

Country/Region of Manufacture 2015 Market Share

North America 69.0%

Japan 15.5%

Germany 7.4%

Other 8.1%

i) What are the variables under study?

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ii) Categorize each variable as quantitative or qualitative.

iii) Categorize each quantitative variable as discrete or continuous.

iv) Express the data in the form of a bar chart and a pie chart.

13. Construct a stem-and-leaf display for the following data:

15 64 15 34 75 24 69 62 41 46

81 67 19 25 48 57 27 72 64 48

77 71 21 20 26 42 83 38 51 35

14. The data below are the daily wages (in maloti) of 30 labourers in a
factory.

2.2 4.1 3.5 4.5 3.2 3.7 3.0 2.6 3.4 3.5

1.6 3.1 3.3 3.8 3.1 4.7 3.7 2.5 4.3 4.2

3.4 3.6 2.9 3.3 3.9 3.1 3.3 3.1 3.7 4.4

3.2 4.1 1.9 3.4 4.7 3.8 3.2 2.6 3.9 3.0

a) Using 6 classes, construct a frequency distribution for the data above.

b) What percentage of the cars had a battery life of at least

c) What percentage of the cars had a battery life of at most

15. A study conducted at NUL revealed that students who attended class
95-100% of the time usually received an A in the class. Students who
attended class 80-90% of the time usually received B or C in the class.
Students who attended class less than 80% of the time usually received a D
or an F or eventually withdrew from the class.

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a) What are the variables under study?

b) What are the data in the study?

c) Are descriptive, inferential, both types of statistics used?

d) What is the population under study?

e) Was the sample collected? If so, from where?

d) From the information given, comment on the relationship between the

Appendix 1: Random Numbers Table