A New York Times article from June 1, 2004, entitled "New York Fiction, by the Numbers" tells about an undergraduate engineering student at Princeton who performed a statistical analysis of stories published in The New Yorker under two different editors. She focused on many variables, such as writer's gender, characters' religion, and main story topics.12 The percentages of topics for all stories published between 1995 and 2001 were listed as follows:
a. Explain how you know that some topics must overlap.
b. What could be the minimum percentage of stories that were about both sex and drugs?
c. If a story is picked at random, what is the maximum possible probability that the story is about sex or drugs (or both)?
d. What could be the maximum percentage of stories that were about both sex and drugs?
e. If a story is picked at random, what is the minimum possible probability that the story is about sex or drugs (or both)?
f. If the student must decide in what order to arrange the topics in a bar graph, is
she mainly concerned with data production, displaying and summarizing, probability, or statistical inference?
g. If the student wants to conclude that approximately 47% of all fiction stories are about sex, is she mainly concerned with data production, displaying and summarizing, probability, or statistical inference?
h. When the student decided what years to examine, was she mainly concerned with data production, displaying and summarizing, probability, or statistical inference?