Question

When if refers to the normal distribution, does the term “normal” have the same meaning as in ordinary language? How can you determine whether the data depicted in a histogram takes on the shape of an approximately normal distribution?

Answer 1

1) In the context of statistics, the term "normal" is referred to a distribution of the data that follows the characteristic of the Normal distribution: symmetrical and bell shaped.

It was named "normal" distribution because it represents many distributions of measures in nature. But it does not represent what is normal or not in all the possible contexts.

2) If we graph the histogram of the data, we can check if the distribution is normal-like byb looking at those two characteristics: how symmetric is the distribution of the data around the mean (the more symmetric, the closer to the normal distribution) and the shape of the distribution (it should be bell-shaped, with more data around the mean and less on the tails).