Question

Determine whether the data collected represents a population or a sample. The income distribution of the top 10% of wage earners in the United States is determined using data from the Internal Revenue Service.

Answer 1

Sample

Explanation:

A sample simply means a randomly selected number of observations culled from a particular population of interest, so they the data points can be a smaller representation of the population observation. In the scenario above, a small fraction of about 10% of the top earners is to be sampled from a larger population of all earners in the United States.

Therefore. The entire United States earners refers to the population distribution of workers while a representative data such as the one taken above is called a sample.