How to Lie with Statistics - Essay Example

Group Review of ‘How to lie with statistics’ by Darrell Huff. The book simply talks about how precise a collection of can be. In addition, it gives the insight of what statistics and estimations are all about. In fact, the book shows vividly that statistics can lie and the estimations made are not fully reliable because the data collected simply represent a few numbers of real values and neglects the larger number.Statistical Lie.A class is made up of thirty students. Five have A’s, 7 have B’s and the rest have failed.

A person decides to run a survey on class performance and samples only ten students. He falls only on the failed students and samples them. He later concludes the all the students in class have failed.Therefore, the conclusion is correct considering that the majority of the students have failed the exam. Although, there are those who have passed the exam very well the mean of the class is very low hence the class is said to have failed. Furthermore, the graph of the class performance is sloping downwards something which shows that the class have failed.

Consequently, mode of the class lies in the cluster of those who have failed hence the conclusion that the class have failed the exam.Evidently, the lie might work because the majority of the students have failed and all of the statistical operations for example, mean, mode and the graph shows that the class have not performed in the example.Work cited.Huff, Darrell. How to lie with statistics. London: Gollancz, 1954. Print.