Being a kid going to school, you can undoubtedly appreciate the study of statistics. If you are the studious student that we know you to be, you must spend some time looking at your grades, calculating that exact grade you needed to make on the exam to keep your A. Well, what you were doing, my friend, was statistics. And from that simple example, you can see that this course, unlike many others, actually has some real world application! Remember when you bugged your algebra teacher about using "6x+5=3" in real life? Well you won't be able to do that to your stat teacher because she/he will be able to whip out so many practical applications you won't know what hit you! So now that you know you can use stat, the next question is: what is statistics? The answer is quite simple. It is the study and analyzation of data! Returning to our classroom example, in statistics terms what you are doing is looking at your data set of grades, finding the mean, and then finding what number must be added to the data set in order to move the mean up by that .1 point you need to get that elusive A. It's quite easy, really. It's statistics.