AP Stat Unit 3 Progress Check: MCQ Part A

The president of a small company needs to collect data on the educational background of all 20 of the company's employees. Which of the following is the best method to use for data collection?

A census

Matt wants to investigate the opinions of young adults in the country, ages 18 years to 25 years, about time spent playing video games. He plans to administer a survey to a sample of people. Which of the following samples is most likely to generalize to his population of interest?

A nationwide sample of people ages 18 to 25

Kristen is investigating the opinions of students at her high school on the new school hours proposed by the school board. Which of the following is her population of interest?

All students at her high school

To estimate the size of a typical housing unit in a certain town, a sociologist plans to use a cluster sampling method to gather data. Which of the following describes a cluster sampling method?

Divide the town into nonoverlapping regions. Randomly select from the nonoverlapping regions, and select all housing units in those regions.

A sample of students will be selected from all the students at a high school. Which of the following sampling methods is least likely to produce a representative sample of the students?

From a randomly chosen home basketball game, choose every tenth student who enters the gymnasium.

The manager of a shopping mall distributed a customer-satisfaction survey by handing it to people as they came through one of the doors to the mall one day. Of those handed out, 215 were completed and returned. Should the results of the survey be generalized to the population of all customers of the shopping mall?

No, because a random sample from all customers of the shopping mall was not selected.

A certain company has five departments, A, B, C, D, and E. The number of employees in each department is 10, 10, 20, 30, and 30, respectively. A sample of 10 employees from all employees will be selected. Of the following descriptions of sampling procedures, which is most likely to introduce a potential source of bias?

Randomly select 10 employees from department C

A survey will be sent to dog owners to investigate their opinions on multiple topics. Which of the following questions on the survey is most likely to contribute to question-wording bias?

Should responsible dog owners purchase pet insurance?

Which of the following is a benefit to using a random sample for an observational study?

The results of the observational study can be generalized to the population.

A certain store has 3,000 employees working at its main location in a city and 100 employees working at a smaller location outside the city. The store manager will select a sample of 50 employees from all the employees to ask their opinions about extending store hours during the holidays. What is the advantage of selecting a stratified random sample, with location as strata, instead of a simple random sample?

The stratified sample assures that the opinions of employees from both locations will be represented.

A teacher at a culinary arts school will conduct an experiment to investigate which of three methods of instruction works best in teaching students how to make a good pie crust. Each student in a group of 60 students will be randomly assigned to one of three methods: in-person demonstration by the instructor, watching a video, and reading a recipe. The students will be assigned so that each method will have 20 students. Each pie crust made will be judged on its taste and texture. What are the treatments of the experiment?

The three methods of instruction

A scientist studying soil acidity collected soil samples from a plot of land with a stream running through it. The soil samples came from land located on only one side of the stream. What is the potential source of bias that might result from the sampling method?

Undercoverage bias