Statistics is the most vital of all the areas of Mathematics (most students that do senior maths do it in Statistics). Statistics is the most common paper taken at Universities in NZ (compulsory for Law, Business, Architecture, Medicine, Marketing degrees).
It is a relatively new piece of mathematics (grown with the use of computers – especially spread sheets). This is because computers can 'crunch' heaps of numbers. Imagine trying to add up manually the weights of every student here at Waihi College - it would literally take hours.
Medicine
– statistics have helped us find causes (and often cures) for diseases. e.g. the trend of death for smokers. Here is an advert that was used when smoking companies tried to say smoking was good for your health. 
Sometimes statistics can trick us into wrong thinking about the relationships between (hard to prove scientifically) driving seatbelts and death. See if you take 100 road deaths probably 90 of them would have their seatbelts on. It would be wrong to assume seatbelt were the cause.
There are two main types of data -
- Counted data (discrete data) these are always whole numbers (no decimals). Say if I asked how many times a group of people went to the movies last year - I would expect to get answer like "none", "five", "three" etc... I shouldn't expect to get an answer like "two and a quarter (2.25)".
- Measured data (continuous data) these are when we do get decimals. Say if I asked how many minutes was your last phone call - I would expect answers like "three and a half" or "ten minutes and twenty seconds" etc.
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