Intro to Quantitative Ecology

Week 04 Pre-Class Assignment

Key Concepts

• Numerical data exploration
• Describing central tendency
• Describing dispersion or spread of data
• Common statistical symbols and formulas

Readings

These questions cover the material in:

• Gardener chapter 4.
  
• Note: You do not have to read section 4.6.

Questions

Question 1

Short-answer: 2 pts

• Describe a situation in which you would not use a normal distribution in a statistical inference problem.

Question 2

Instructions

Review the mean() function in R.

Short answer, R-code: 2 pts

• In R, what would be returned if you compute the mean value of a vector containing the following values: 4, 9, 2, 13, NA, 9?

• Paste the R-code you used to check.

• Is the answer what you expected?

Question 3

Multiple choice 1 pt

• Choose the most appropriate term to describe the distribution of the data summarized in the histogram.

normal right-skewed left-skewed non-parametric

Question 4

Multiple choice: 1 pt

• Choose the most appropriate measure of central tendency to describe the data summarized in this histogram.

median mean standard deviation range maximum

Question 5

Multiple choice: 1 pt

• Choose the most appropriate measure of central tendency to describe the data summarized in this histogram.

mean standard deviation range maximum

Question 6

Multiple choice: 1 pt

• Which of the following are measures of the variability or dispersion in a sample of data?

standard deviation range minimum value maximum value mean

Submit to Moodle

These questions are for your reference, the same questions will appear in the assignment page on Moodle.

You should do your work outside of Moodle, saving your answers in a document and/or R script file.

When you are ready to submit your answers, you can paste your complete responses in the corresponding Moodle question entries for the assignment.