How would you explain what an ANOVA is to someone who has not taken a statistics class before?

Create a hypothesis for a psychological study whereby it would be necessary to use an ANOVA to test this hypothesis. State how many groups are in your study and how many participants are in each group. Figure out the between groups degrees of freedom and the within groups degrees of freedom. Use the F table at the back of your textbook to determine what F ratio you will need to achieve to be able to reject the null hypothesis.

If your findings were significant you would conduct post hoc analyses. Why would you carry out post-hoc testing rather than conducting multiple t tests to compare your groups?