Question

Suppose you want to find out how many hours of exercise the students at your school get each week. At the school gym you ask everybody you see, "how many hours of of exercise do you get every week."

1. will the results of your survey be representative of your entire school? explain

2.is there a better location to conduct your survey.

3. suppose you asked," Do you work out every day like a healthy person or are you a lazy couch potato who only works out once in a while?" do you think the results of your survey would change? explain your reasoning.

4. What is the population in this survey?

5.Is it realistic to poll the entire population? Why or why not?

Answer 1

1. The students at the gym might be inclined to exercise for longer each week than the average amount of weekly exercise for the whole school. Therefore it is possible that the results would not be representative of the whole school.
2. Sampling students at a neutral location such as at the school gates when students are arriving for school would be better than at the gym.
3. Framing the question in a way that encourages a false answer to avoid embarrassment will make the results invalid.
4. The population is all the students at the scholl.
5. Polling all the students would need significant organisation and take much longer than polling a representative random sample of an appropriate number of students.