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เนื้อหาย่อ : As the name implies, the objective of Basic Statistics for Business and Economics is to provide students majoring in economics, finance, marketing, accounting, management, and other fields of business administration, with an introductory survey of the many busi- ness applications of descriptive and inferential statistics. When Bob Mason wrote his first statistics text back in 1967, locating relevant data was a problem. That has changed! Today, locating data is not a problem. The number of items you purchase at the grocery store is automatically recorded. The phone company keeps track of the length of a call, the time of the day the call was made, and the number of people called. Medical devices automatically monitor and record our heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature. A large amount of business information is recorded and re- ported almost instantly. CNN, USA Today, and NBC News, for example, have web sites where you can track stock prices with a delay of less than 20 minutes. There are volumes of information on sports. Today, skills are needed to deal with all this numerical information. First, we need to be critical consumers of information presented by others. Second, we need to be able to reduce large amounts of data into a meaningful form so that we can make effective deci- sions. When we began teaching, only a few students had calculators. Today, many students have a computer at home or in their dorm room, and most have access to a computer in a Computer Lab. Statistical software is widely available, as is electronically stored data. In response to these changes, we have made some changes in the text, such as adding Excel screen captures within chapters and commands at the end of chapters, replacing some calculation examples with interpretation ones, and so forth. In this edition we con- tinue the use of MINITAB software but add Excel spreadsheet examples because much of the current world uses Microsoft applications. Users of previous editions will notice another change, the addition of William G. Mar- chal as a coauthor. Bill is a longtime friend and colleague at The University of Toledo. We have collaborated for years on book writing projects, including, informally, this one. I am pleased to welcome him and acknowledge his significant contribution to this edition. On a sad note, Bob Mason passed away shortly before we began the revision process. We will miss him as a coauthor, mentor, colleague, and most importantly as a friend. Acknowledgments The third edition of Basic Statistics for Business and Economics is the product of many dents, colleagues, reviewers, and the staff at Irwin/McGraw-Hill them all. We wish to express our sincere gratitude to the reviewers: