Everybody uses statistics to help in our lives. For instance, a shopkeeper might want to know what products people buy more often so she can choose what products to sell in her store. A restaurant might want to know how many people usually come and what dishes they prefer so they will know what food to prepare and how much. This makes their businesses more effective and save money. Many businesses and organisations use statistics to help their company understand its customers better. In fact, Statistics are used almost anywhere and at anytime. Economics, accounting, business, banking all require the use of statistics. Statistics are used to gather, classify, tabulate, analyse and interpret data. Without statistics, scientists and analysts will not be able to gather, record and present data, hence slowing down the pace of the development of science and technology, which will lead to many bigger problems.
However, there are some bad points about statistics. Some statistics tends to be biased. Biased statistics can make a data gathered in favor of a certain organisation. For example, a certain survey is conducted to see how many people like a particular fast food restaurant. These people could be daily patrons, and could have been targeted by the surveyors, or maybe even bribed. These advertisements attract more customers, hence making their business much better. However, biased statistical data can make a company’s advertisement misleading. When consumers buy products from the company and soon discover that the advertisement is misleading, the customer might perhaps never buy from that company again or might even spread the word about that company. This could lead to the company losing a huge sum of money. Therefore, people collecting the data that would be used in statistics have to be as careful as possible and make the results collected less biased. Almost every statistical data collected is biased as it is practically impossible to ensure a non-biased data due to the fact that there are people who did not participate in the data collection process or are limiting themselves to a particular answer because of emotional factors like the unwillingness to be shamed or to avoid some inconvenience when the true data is provided to the surveyor.
