Question

Normal Distribution What’s wrong with the following statement? “Because the digits 0, 1, 2, . . . , 9 are the normal results from lottery drawings, such randomly selected numbers have a normal distribution.”

Short answer

The literal meaning of normal is different from the statistical term normal distribution, which signifies a symmetric bell-shaped curve.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

The statement is “Because the digits 0, 1, 2, . . . , 9 are the normal results from lottery drawings, such randomly selected numbers have a normal distribution.”

Define a normal distribution

A normal distribution is one of the symmetric distributions defined on continuous data and forms a bell-shape, symmetric about the mean measure.

Analyze the lottery drawings

Ideally, the drawings from the lottery are expected to be equally likely for each digit. In that case, the probability of drawing each digit is the same, which is 0.1$\left(\frac{1}{10}\right)$ in this case as the number of possibilities is10.

The statement with normal results signifies the uniform pick of the digits in a literal sense.

In the case of statistics, a normal distribution is described differently as stated above. Thus, the statement is wrong.