why and how to use a Random Number Generator to take a sample?

Question

plzzz help

Answer 1

From the viewpoint of statistics, it is important to be unbiased if we are to characterize the world statistically.

For example, suppose you wish to compute the average number of children in the households in your town. Because it is not practical to survey every home, you must take some sampled data. You might try walking door to door, but in doing so you might accidently "bias" the results by selecting a retirement community which will have few to no children.

One approach would be to use a random number generator to select the addresses or lat/long location of homes to survey. A random number generator is a simple math function that produces a series of random numbers with that are not correlated to each other.

For example, the RAND function in Excel returns an evenly distributed random number greater than or equal to 0 and less than 1. A new random number is returned every time the worksheet is calculated. The random number produced by RAND can be scaled or manipulated in a way to randomly sample sets of data for analysis.

Answer 2

You use a random number generator in order to take a random sample.
You need to take a random sample in order for the sample to be representative of the population you are trying to examine.
You also need your sample to be representative in order that you can calculate statistics for the whole population from it.

Simply pressing the ran# button on your calculator will generate a random number between 0 and 1