Question

A public health expert is worried that a recent outbreak of a disease may be related to a batch of spinach from a certain farm. She wants to test the plants at the farm, but it will ruin the crop if she tests all of them.If the farm has 5,000 spinach plants, describe a method that would produce a random sample of 10 plants.Why would a random sample be useful in this situation?

Answer 1

Answer: Systematic Random Sample

Explanation:

Based on the information given, the method that would produce a random sample of 10 plants is the systematic random sample.

Systematic sampling is referred to as a probability sampling method whereby a random sample, that has a fixed periodic interval, will be chosen from the larger population. It should be noted that the fixed periodic interval, can be gotten by dividing the population by desired sample size.

In this case, since there are 5000 plants and there needs to ba a random sample of 10 plants, the fixed periodic interval will be: = 5000/10 = 500th plant. That means the 500th plant will be chosen.