In a certain school, students can choose whether to eat in the school’s cafeteria. A reporter working for the school’s newspaper
polled students on their reactions to changes in the menu at the cafeteria. For each student leaving the cafeteria in one 30-minute time period, the reporter used a coin to determine whether to stop the student and ask how he or she felt about the new menu. In the reporter’s article it was stated that a random sample of the students showed that 89 percent of the school’s student population was happy with the new menu. Which of the following statements is true? A.Because each student leaving the cafeteria was randomly selected and could choose to answer or not, this is a random sample of the student population, and the 89% is an accurate measurement of the school population’s view of the new menu.
B. Because students self-selected whether to eat in the cafeteria, the sampling method might be biased and the sample might not be representative of all students in the school.
C. The survey would have been more effective if the reporter had collected the data in one 15-minute time period rather than in one 30-minute time period.
D. The survey would have been more effective if students who cared about the food could have called the reporter to tell how they felt about the new menu, so that only students with opinions on the subject would have been surveyed.
E. Because no treatment was imposed on the students eating in the cafeteria, one cannot make any conclusions about the new menu.
The statement that is true is B. Because students self-selected whether to eat in the cafeteria, the sampling method might be biased and the sample might not be representative of all students in the school.
Step-by-step explanation:
Because of students can decide if they eat in the cafeteria or not, the sample obtained by the reporter can be extrapolatedonly to the population of students that actually eat in the cafeteria, not to all students population. To make a conclusion of the degree of conformity of all students population, the poll should have been conducted in a hallway of the school (to get the opinion of all students, not only the ones that go to the cafeteria). In other way, the reporter are loosing the opinion of those students that are not happy with the new menu, and decide not going to the cafeteria.
