ABSTRACT
The concepts we discuss in this chapter provide an essential foundation that will carry through the rest of the book. We gather these concepts together in one chapter so that we can look at them in depth, and so that it will be easy for you to come back to them as needed, for review, as you read later chapters. In reviewing these basic concepts, we spend most of our time in this chapter considering the mean and standard deviation of a continuous variable. These basic concepts will extend to the other types of tests that we consider in later chapters. Before delving into these concepts, we begin by illustrating the two types of statistical inference that we will consider in this chapter and in future chapters.
