Statistics are used almost anywhere and at anytime. Economics, accounting, business, banking all require the use of statistics. Statistics are used to gather, classify, tabulate, analyse and interpret data. Without statistics, there could probably be an economic downturn, companies might not earn money as data such as preferences and habits and customers are unknown. Data of road usage, people in different age, ethnic, dialect groups, place of birth, marital status, religion, literacy,level of education, people in different occupation and gross monthly income from work is not known. With such a lack of data collected, there is no way the government can develop the country and cater to the needs of citizens. Thus, Singapore will not be a first-world country but rather a third world country. Banks would lose money without the help of statistics to keep track of their money. Without statistics, scientist and analysts could not gather, record and present data and as a result, slowing down or even halting the pace of the development of science and technology. This could prevent us from learning more about the world we live in. Factories would have no idea on their monthly manufacturing performance and thus the output might decrease and worst of all, without statistics, they are unaware and unable to increase the pace of production.
Although statistics can help us in numerous ways, some statistics tends to be biased. Biased statistics can make a data gathered in favor of a certain organisation. For example, a certain survey is conducted to see how many students from all local schools use Facebook. The results are biased as home-schooled students are not included. Almost every statistical data collected is biased as it is practically impossible to ensure a non-biased data due to the fact that there are people who did not participate in the data collection process or are limiting themselves to a particular answer because of emotional factors like the unwillingness to be shamed or to avoid some inconvenience when the true data is provided to the surveyor. Biased statistical data can make a company’s advertisement misleading. When consumers belief the advertisement and buy products from the company and soon discovers that the advertisement is misleading, the customer might perhaps never buy from that company again or might even spread the word about that company. This could lead to the company losing a huge sum of money. Therefore, people collecting the data that would be used in statistics have to be as careful as possible and make the results collected less biased. Biased statistics could also lead to other problems. One example is when a company conducts a survey to find out the likes and dislikes of its customers in a bid to develop wonderful products that many people would purchase, and the data collected is biased (which means the statistics would be biased as well), the company might end up developing products that customers do not like and end up losing lots of money as well.
