When we were small we used to have quizzes, they all started with the line…a riddle a riddle a ree….so therefore here is a riddle for you.

If you wanted to know whether you were a friendly person or not and you were using Facebook as the means of measure, how will you know? Does the fact that you have 50 friends mean you are friendly and extroverted?

Well the only way to answer this question is to move from data to information via statistics. Data is the lists of how many friends each of our friends have. When we group our friends according to the number of friends they have – we are engaged in the first stage of statistics. We could go further to project which of our friends are gregarious and which are not and more importantly whether we are friendly or not. That is the use of the same data to give us information.

So here is the riddle:

If five of your friends had 300, 164, 43, 35 and 10 friends respectively, are you a friendly person or not?

If you subsequently find out that the average person on Facebook has 35 friends, what would you say? Are you friendly or not?

Suppose you chose one of your friends randomly can you use this information to project how many friends he may have?

Well you can if you use statistics.