Example 1: polls
a recent poll stated that 40% of americans pay "a great deal" or a "fair amount" of attention to the nutritional information that restaurants provide. this poll was based on a random sample
of 2,027 adults living in the united states.
the 40% corresponds to a proportion of 0.40, and 0.40 is called a sample proportion. it is an estimate of the proportion of all adults who would say they pay "a great deal" or a
"fair amount" of attention to the nutritional information that restaurants provide. if you were to take a random sample of 20 americans, how many would you predict would say that they pay
attention to nutritional information? in this lesson, you will investigate this question by generating distributions of sample proportions and investigating patterns in these distributions.
your teacher will give your group a container of dried beans. some of the beans in the container are black. with your classmates, you are going to see what happens when you take a
sample of beans from the container and use the proportion of black beans in the sample to estimate the proportion of black beans in the container (a population proportion).