Question

Jerome's favorite Harry Potter book has 22 chapters, 500 pages, and approximately 100,000words. He's curious how many of the words are "made up" words or names that don't exist in the dictionary.

He wants to take a systematic random sample of about 500 words to estimate what percent of the words in the book are made up.
Which of these strategies will accomplish his intended design?
*
Randomly select one of the first 20words and every 20th word thereafter for the sample.

Randomly select one of the first \[200\] words and every 200th word thereafter for the sample.

Randomly select 23 words from each chapter.

Randomly select 1word from each page.

Assign every word a number and use a computer to randomly select 500 numbers with no repeats.​

Answer 1

Using sampling concepts, it is found that a systematic sampling of 500 words would be achieved by option: B. Randomly select one of the first 200 words and then every 200th word thereafter for the sample.

This plan makes sure to follow a method, but also brings in some unpredictability. It talks about different parts of the book and makes sure to use a variety of words to avoid any favoritism.

Therefore, using every 200th word helps to get a good sample size without having too few or too many words. This way tries to show the whole book fairly, while also keeping the sample size small enough to study.