Malachi is a pretty good football player. During the first seven games of the season he scored between three and eighteen touchdowns. Fans are now confident that he will score at least ten touchdowns in the next game. What is a problem with this conclusion?

Question

Amir Glenn

Mathematics

20 March, 07:30

Malachi is a pretty good football player. During the first seven games of the season he scored between three and eighteen touchdowns. Fans are now confident that he will score at least ten touchdowns in the next game. What is a problem with this conclusion?

+2

Answers (1)

Know the Answer?

Twig · Answer 1

Answer: so in the first 7 games, eh scored between 3 and 18 touchdowns.

if you assume there is a even distribution, you will get a media of (18 - 3) / 2 + 3 = 10.5

so yes, in theory he will score 10.5 more or less.

the first error is assuming that he will score at least 10.5 on watching this result, 10.5 is the most probable number, not the minimum.

the second problem here, is that you are doing statistics with just 7 samples, that is not enough samples to do proper statistics.