Suppose annual day of your school is to be celebrated. The school has decided to felicitate those parents of the students studying in classes XI and XII, who are the alumni of the same school. In this context, answer the following questions:
Which statistical technique should be used to find out the number of students whose both parents are alumni of this school?
To find out the number of students whose both parents are alumni of this school, counting or frequency distribution should be used as the statistical technique. The data needs to be filtered to identify students whose both parents are alumni, and then the total count of such students can be calculated.
How varied are the age of parents of the students of that school?
To find how varied the age of parents of the students is, standard deviation should be used as the statistical technique. Standard deviation measures the dispersion or spread of data values from the mean. A higher standard deviation indicates greater variation in the ages of parents, while a lower value indicates that ages are clustered closer to the average. Range can also be used to find the difference between the maximum and minimum age values.
Explanation
This question tests understanding of basic statistical techniques for data analysis. Part (a) requires identifying that counting/frequency distribution is appropriate for finding the number of items meeting specific criteria (both parents being alumni). Part (b) requires recognizing that standard deviation is the standard measure of variation/dispersion in data, which is appropriate for measuring how spread out the ages are. The textbook context in Question 5 references standard deviation for measuring temperature variation, which applies similarly to age variation.