Question

Blood Platelet Counts Listed below are blood platelet counts (1000 cells/mL) randomly selected from adults in the United States. Why does it not make sense to construct a histogram for this data set?

191 286 263 193 193 215 162 646 250 386

Short answer

As the sample size is very small, the nature of the distribution of the dataset cannot be observed from the histogram plotted for this sample.

Thus, there is no sense in constructing a histogram for the given sample.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

The dataset includes blood platelet counts (1000 cells/mL) of a sample of 10 adults.

Histogram of a distribution

The shape of the histogram of a dataset depicts the type of distribution that the dataset follows.

For a population following a normal distribution, the sample extracted from it (of sufficiently large size) also follows the same distribution.

However, if the sample size is insufficient/very less, the shape of the histogram cannot accurately inform anything about the distribution of the sample.

Here, the sample size is equal to 10 while the population size is over a hundred million.

Thus, the histogram of such a small size will not describe anything about the distribution of the blood platelet counts of adult males in the US.