ShmoopTube

00:00

Sorry And here's your shmoop du jour brought to you

00:04

by the margin of error the part of your paper

00:07

where it's safe to make mistakes Really All right Well

00:11

scientific polls contain a margin of error of plus or

00:13

minus What And hear the potential answers with three four

00:17

five All right Well poles might seem super scientific with

00:21

all their decimals and prevented signs and whatnot but they

00:24

can't claim to be exactly right one hundred percent of

00:26

the time See what we did there will do Scientific

00:30

polls contain a margin of error of plus or minus

00:32

a one percent Well the margin of error basically means

00:35

how much wiggle room you have when you're giving your

00:38

exact answer But one percent seems a little too small

00:41

So let's look for something that gives us a bit

00:43

more room to groove Good The margin of error of

00:45

plus or minus two percent Stupid question This is by

00:48

the way who is certainly better than one But we're

00:50

still a little too thin around the margins here So

00:52

he's more of a bus Well we're going to skip

00:55

to d what should i tell you What The answer

00:57

Is how about four percent Well four certainly evens things

01:00

out of it but we might have gone a little

01:01

too far in the wrong direction What about e five

01:04

percent Well what if we got a seventy ana tasked

01:07

with a plus or minus five percent huh Pretty wide

01:10

swing That means that scientific polls contain a margin of

01:13

error of plus or minus three percent You know who

01:16

made that law for three percent but that's how they

01:18

do it three percent a bit of an arbitrary cut

01:20

off But it's generally accepted standard for poles of finding

01:24

a fifty percent with a three percent margin of error

01:27

means that the real answer if you could ask all

01:30

members of the population would range somewhere between forty seven

01:33

and fifty three percent So c is the correct answer

01:36

Margins of error alleviate the pressure to be exact one

01:39

hundred percent of the time making it easier when you

01:42

have to dig yourself out of a particularly bad fool 00:01:46.834 --> [endTime] don't don't

Full Transcript