ABSTRACT
Introduction The chapter heading alone probably leaves most of us a bit squeamish. Whenever this topic in statistics is broached, students usually come away a little weak in the knees and with a cold chill running down the spine. The bad news, unfortunately, is that this chapter, as well as the two that follow, is a necessary evil. The good news is that we try to make it as painless as possible by taking a straightforward approach to describing what a probability distribution is, and more imK portant, what it means to us common folk who do not know much about statistics. We will attempt to accomplish this with a minimal amount of mathematics, and where complicated or tedious mathematical operations are needed, we will use POLYSTAT to do this anyway.
