1Statistics in the Modern World¶
An interactive companion for MATH 1209 at CSU Bakersfield.
Statistics is the science of learning from data — and data is everywhere: in the news you read, the ads you scroll past, the health advice you get, and the decisions you make about money, work, and school. This book will help you become someone who can look at a number, a graph, or a headline and ask the right question: How do they know that? Should I believe it?
We keep the examples close to everyday life on purpose. You will meet a shelter full of cats and dogs, a coffee shop timing its morning rush, students comparing their sleep and screen time, and a phone that keeps dying at the worst moment. The statistics is the new part — the stories are ones you already understand.
1.1How this book works¶
Every topic is built in the same friendly order, so you always know what to expect:
You can succeed in this course with just a calculator. The R boxes are there to show you the method working and to give you a head start on a tool used across many careers — they are always optional unless your instructor says otherwise.
1.2What you’ll be able to do by December¶
Tell a good study from a misleading one, and know when “causes” is fair to say.
Summarize data with the right graph and the right numbers.
Reason about chance and the Normal (“bell curve”) model.
Build and interpret a confidence interval and run a hypothesis test — the two ideas at the heart of how researchers make claims from data.
1.3Getting help¶
Want to run the R boxes? Use the CSUB JupyterHub at https://
csub .jupyter .cal -icor .org/ — log in with your CSUB account and R is ready in your browser, mosaicandBSDAalready installed. Nothing to install.Your instructor’s office hours and the Math Tutoring Center (Science III 208).
Co-requisite MATH 952 students: your support session gives you extra practice and a refresher on the arithmetic each week uses.
The Ask-the-Tutor helper (when enabled) guides you with questions — it will not do graded work for you, but it is a patient study partner at 2 a.m.
This is a free, openly licensed book (CC BY-SA 4.0), adapted from and following the chapter structure of OpenIntro Statistics, 4th edition. You never have to buy anything to do well in this course.