Chapter 1.2, Problem 8P

Critical Thinking Consider the students in your statistics class as the population and suppose they are seated in four rows of 10 students each. To select a sample, you toss a coin. If it comes up heads, you use the 20 students sitting in the first two rows as your sample. If it comes up tails, you use the 20 students sitting in the last two rows as your sample.

1. (a) Does every student have an equal chance of being selected for the sample? Explain.
2. (b) Is it possible to include students sitting in row 3 with students sitting in row 2 in your sample? Is your sample a simple random sample? Explain.
3. (c) Describe a process you could use to get a simple random sample of size 20 from a class of size 40.