Which of the five basic activities of statistics is represented by each of the following situations?
a. A factory’s quality control division is examining detailed quantitative information about recent productivity in order to identify possible trouble spots.
b. A focus group is discussing the audience that would best be targeted by advertising, with the goal of drawing up and administering a questionnaire to this group.
c. In order to get the most out of your firm’s Internet activity data, it would help to have a framework or structure of equations to allow you to identify and work with the relationships in the data.
d. A firm is being sued for gender discrimination. Data that show salaries for men and women are presented to the jury to convince them that there is a consistent pattern of discrimination and that such a disparity could not be due to randomness alone.
e. The size of next quarter’s gross national product must be known so that a firm’s sales can be forecast. Since it is unavailable at this time, an educated guess is used.