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Statistical Reasoning for Everyday Life, 6th edition

Published by Pearson (February 13, 2023) © 2024

  • Jeff Bennett University of Colorado at Boulder
  • William L. Briggs University of Colorado Denver
  • Mario F. Triola Dutchess Community College

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For courses in Statistical Literacy.

A qualitative approach to reasoning with statistics

Using real-life examples, Statistical Reasoning for Everyday Life helps students understand the statistics needed for their college courses, to reason with statistical information in their careers, and to evaluate and make everyday decisions. The authors approach each concept qualitatively, using computation techniques only to enhance understanding and build on ideas as they work up to real examples and complex case studies.

Among many other enhancements the 6th Edition updates discussions and examples throughout, revising or replacing many examples and case studies to reflect the latest data and topics. 

Hallmark features of this title

  • Worked examples enable students to practice with different types of questions. Case studies help students explore real issues in depth.
  • Think About It questions ask students to reflect on key ideas and concepts; excellent for classroom discussion and clicker questions.
  • Using Technology sections in each chapter discuss calculations and guide students on using tools such as Excel®, SPSS® and STATDISK®.
  • Abundant exercises:
    • Statistical Literacy and Critical Thinking short-answer questions; Does It Make Sense? short statements on statistical concepts; Concepts and Applications exercises.
  • Focus topic sections conclude each chapter and explore important statistical issues in depth, with a set of questions for assignment or discussion. Topics chosen show the wide variety of fields in which statistics plays a role.

New and updated features of this title

  • NEW / REVISED: Dozens of in-text and numbered examples and case studies have been updated or replaced, ensuring that they reflect the latest data and topics of interest. 
  • NEW: 4 completely new Focus topics (with substantial rewriting of most others) to bring them fully up to date and add great relevance for students. Special emphasis on 2 critical topics includes:
    • Focus on the Covid-19 Pandemic: 3 new Focus topics devoted to issues relating to the pandemic appear in Chapters 1, 2, and 10. 
    • Focus on Climate Change: 3 Focus topics are devoted to climate change, appearing in Chapters 3, 5 and 7. 
  • REVISED: Significantly revised section exercise sets, replacing roughly a quarter of the exercises and revising or updating data in many of the others. 

Features of MyLab Statistics for the 6th Edition

  • NEW: Animated Flow Charts use narrated visuals to explain key concepts. They are available to assign as media and have connected assessment in the assignment manager.
  • Over 1000 Conceptual Questions are available in the assignment manager that require students to apply their statistical understanding.
  • StatTalk Videos: 24 videos hosted by fun-loving statistician Andrew Vickers demonstrate statistical concepts through stories and real events. Videos include assessment questions and instructor's guide.
  • Exercises with immediate feedback: Assignable exercises regenerate algorithmically to give students unlimited opportunity for practice and mastery, offering helpful feedback when students enter incorrect answers. Optional learning aids include Help Me Solve This, View an Example, videos and an eText.
  • Personalized learning  includes the Study Plan, Personalized Homework, and Companion Study Plan Assignments.
  • StatCrunch® integration: Students can analyze data sets from exercises and the text. Access to  www.StatCrunch.com enables students to access tens of thousands of shared data sets, create and conduct online surveys, perform complex analyses, and generate compelling reports. The StatCrunch Question Library makes it easy to assign projects or exercises that enable students to use the statistical software to analyze robust and engaging data sets.

How to Succeed in Your Statistics Course

Applications Index

1. Speaking of Statistics

  • 1.1 What Is/Are Statistics?
  • 1.2 Sampling
  • 1.3 Types of Statistical Studies
  • 1.4 Should You Believe a Statistical Study?
  • FOCUS ON PSYCHOLOGY: Are You Driving “Drunk” on Your Cell Phone?
  • FOCUS ON PUBLIC HEALTH: Is Your Lifestyle Healthy?
  • FOCUS ON THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: Why Is Statistics Critical to Understanding the Pandemic?

2. Measurement in Statistics

  • 2.1 Data Types and Levels of Measurement
  • 2.2 Dealing with Errors
  • 2.3 Uses of Percentages in Statistics
  • 2.4 Index Numbers
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Inflation Calculator
  • FOCUS ON POLITICS: Who Benefits Most from a Tax Cut?
  • FOCUS ON ECONOMICS: What is the “Chained” CPI, and Why Does It Matter?
  • FOCUS ON THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: Was Remote Learning a Viable Substitute for In-Person Classes?

3. Visual Displays of Data

  • 3.1 Frequency Tables
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Frequency Tables
  • 3.2 Picturing Distributions of Data
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Bar Graphs
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Pie Charts
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Line Charts and Histograms
  • 3.3 Graphics in the Media
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Graphs with Multiple Data Sets
  • 3.4 A Few Cautions about Graphics
  • FOCUS ON HISTORY: Can War Be Described with a Graph?
  • FOCUS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: How Much Is the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration Changing? 

4. Describing Data

  • 4.1 What Is Average?
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Mean, Median, and Mode
  • 4.2 Shapes of Distributions
  • 4.3 Measures of Variation
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Quartiles
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Boxplots
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Standard Deviation
  • 4.4 Statistical Paradoxes
  • FOCUS ON THE STOCK MARKET: What's Average about the Dow?
  • FOCUS ON ECONOMICS: Are the Rich Getting Richer?

5. A Normal World

  • 5.1 What Is Normal?
  • 5.2 Properties of the Normal Distribution
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Standard Scores and Percentiles
  • 5.3 The Central Limit Theorem
  • FOCUS ON EDUCATION: What Can We Learn from SAT Trends?
  • FOCUS ON PSYCHOLOGY: Are We Smarter Than Our Parents?
  • FOCUS ON CLIMATE CHANGE: How Much Hotter Is the New “Normal”?

6. Probability in Statistics

  • 6.1 The Role of Probability in Statistics: Statistical Significance
  • 6.2 Basics of Probability
  • 6.3 The Law of Large Numbers
  • 6.4 Ideas of Risk and Life Expectancy
  • 6.5 Combining Probabilities (Supplementary Section)
  • FOCUS ON SOCIAL SCIENCE: Do Lotteries Harm People with Lower Incomes?
  • FOCUS ON LAW: Is DNA Analysis Reliable?

7. Correlation and Causality

  • 7.1 Seeking Correlation
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Scatterplots and Correlation Coefficients
  • 7.2 Interpreting Correlations
  • 7.3 Best-Fit Lines and Prediction
  • 7.4 The Search for Causality
  • FOCUS ON EDUCATION: What Helps Children Learn to Read?
  • FOCUS ON CLIMATE CHANGE: What Is Causing Global Warming (and What Can We Do About It)? 

8. Inferences from Samples to Populations

  • 8.1 Sampling Distributions
  • 8.2 Estimating Population Means
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Confidence Interval for a Population Mean
  • 8.3 Estimating Population Proportions
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Confidence Interval for a Population Proportion
  • FOCUS ON HISTORY: Where Did Statistics Begin?
  • FOCUS ON LITERATURE: How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know?

9. Hypothesis Testing

  • 9.1 Fundamentals of Hypothesis Testing
  • 9.2 Hypothesis Tests for Population Means
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Hypothesis Test for a Population Mean
  • 9.3 Hypothesis Tests for Population Proportions
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Hypothesis Test for a Population Proportion
  • FOCUS ON HEALTH AND EDUCATION: Will Your Education Help You Live Longer?
  • FOCUS ON AGRICULTURE: Are Genetically Modified Foods Safe?

10. t Tests, Two-Way Tables, and ANOVA

  • 10.1 t Distribution for Inferences about a Mean
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Confidence Intervals Using the t Distribution
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Hypothesis Tests with the t Distribution
  • 10.2 Hypothesis Testing with Two-Way Tables
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Hypothesis Testing with Two-Way Tables
  • 10.3 Analysis of Variance (One-Way ANOVA)
  • USING TECHNOLOGY: Analysis of Variance
  • FOCUS ON CRIMINOLOGY: Can You Tell a Fraud When You See One?
  • FOCUS ON EDUCATION: What Can a Fourth-Grader Do with Statistics?
  • FOCUS ON THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: Have Covid Vaccines Really Saved Lives?
  • Epilogue: A Perspective on Statistics

Appendices

A: z-Score Tables
B: Table of Random Numbers

Websites and Suggested Readings

Glossary

Credits

Answers

Index

About our authors

Jeffrey Bennett holds a BA in biophysics (University of California, San Diego) and an MS and a PhD in astrophysics (University of Colorado), and has focused his career on math and science education. Bennett served as the first director of the program "Quantitative Reasoning and Mathematical Skills" at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he developed the groundbreaking curriculum that became the basis of the textbook Using & Understanding Mathematics: A Quantitative Reasoning Approach (currently in its 8th Edition), which he co-authored with William Briggs. He is also the lead author of best-selling college textbooks on astronomy and astrobiology, and of more than a dozen books for children and adults. All 6 of his children's books have been selected for NASA's Story Time From Space. Among his other projects, Dr. Bennett proposed and co-led the development of the Voyage Scale Model Solar System in Washington, DC; created the free Totality app to help people learn about total solar eclipses; wrote an online primer on global warming; and developed a free, online curriculum for middle-school Earth and Space Science. Learn more at Dr. Bennett's websites, Jeffrey Bennett: Astronomer, Teacher, & Writer, and Big Kid Science.

William L. Briggs was on the mathematics faculty at Clarkson University for 6 years and at the University of Colorado at Denver for 23 years, where he taught both undergraduate and graduate courses, with a special interest in applied mathematics. During much of that time he designed and taught courses in quantitative reasoning. In addition to this book, he has co-authored textbooks on statistical reasoning and calculus, as well as monographs in computational mathematics. He is also author of How America Got Its Guns (University of New Mexico Press). Dr. Briggs is a University of Colorado President's Teaching Scholar and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ireland; he holds a BA degree from the University of Colorado and an MS and a PhD from Harvard University.

Mario F. Triola  is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Dutchess Community College, where he has taught statistics for over 30 years. Marty also is the author of Elementary Statistics, 14th Edition; Elementary Statistics Using Excel, 7th Edition; Essentials of Statistics, 7th Edition and Elementary Statistics Using the TI-83/84 Plus Calculator, 5th Edition. He is a coauthor of Biostatistics for the Biological and Health Sciences, 2nd Edition. Marty designed the original Statdisk statistical software, and he has written several manuals and workbooks for technology supporting statistics education. He has been a speaker at many conferences and colleges. Marty's consulting work includes the design of casino slot machines and fishing rods. He has worked with attorneys in determining probabilities in paternity lawsuits, analyzing data in medical malpractice lawsuits, identifying salary inequities based on gender, and analyzing disputed election results. He has also used statistical methods in analyzing medical school surveys, analyzing survey results for the New York City Transit Authority, and analyzing COVID-19 virus data for government officials. Marty has testified as an expert witness in the New York State Supreme Court. The Text and Academic Authors Association has awarded Marty a "Texty" for Excellence for his work on Elementary Statistics, which at this writing has been the #1 statistics book in the United States for the past 25 years.

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