
# 3: The Number Line


• 3.1: Distance between Two Points on a Number Line
• 3.2: Plotting Points and Intervals on the Number Line
The number line is of fundamental importance and is used repeatedly in statistics. It is a tool to visualize all of the possible outcomes of a study and to organize the results of the study. Often a diagram is placed above the number line to provide us with a picture of the results. By the end of this section, you will be able to plot points and intervals on a number line and use these plots to understand the possible outcomes and actual outcomes of studies.
• 3.3: Represent an Inequality as an Interval on a Number Line
Inequalities come up frequently in statistics and it is often helpful to plot the inequality on the number line in order to visualize the inequality. This helps both for inequalities that involve real numbers and for inequalities that refer to just integer values. As an extension of this idea, we often want to look at the complement of an inequality, that is all numbers that make the inequality false. In this section we will look at examples that accomplish this task.
• 3.4: The Midpoint
As the word sounds, "midpoint" means "the point in the middle". Finding a midpoint is not too difficult and has applications in many areas of statistics, from confidence intervals to sketching distributions, to means.