The entire group of American adolescents is an example of a ________.

• A. Sample
• B. Statistic
• C. Population
• D. Parameter

Answer: (C)

In statistics, the word population refers to the entire group you want to understand. Here, the “entire group of American adolescents” means every individual in that group, not just a subset. A sample would be a smaller group drawn from that population to study. A statistic is a numeric summary computed from that sample (for example, the average hours of sleep of the sampled adolescents). A parameter is the corresponding numeric description of the whole population (the true average hours of sleep for all American adolescents), which we typically don’t know. So the best fit is population.