It will be easy to provide an example to better illustrate this. Lets suppose that a patient has been diagnosed with cancer and is trying to figure which between chemotherapy or taking drugs is the best treatment. The question this cancer patient is going to ask herself is which among the two will prolong her life. Thus, survival time is the response variable. In our case, the price is the response variable because it is the determining factor of where these college students will live. Amenities somehow affect the price and thus, it will act as the response variable. Price is what we are able to measure and the location which is the students' primary interest lies in our response variable
The correct answer is "sample." ideally these are randomly selected observations as to prevent bias. we can assume the samples that are unaffected by systemic bias represent the population due to rules of the normal distribution.
