The Basic Concepts of Statistics

Statistics is the branch of mathematics that examines ways to process and analyze data. Statistics provides procedures to collect and transform data in ways that are useful to business decision-makers. To understand about  statistics, you need to first understand the meaning of a variable.
Variables are characteristics of items or individuals.
Examples of variables are your gender, your major field of study, the amount of money you have in your wallet, and the amount of time it takes you to get ready to go to school in the morning. The key word of Variable is the idea that items differ and people differ. The person next to you may be female rather than male, may be majoring in a different
field of study than you, almost certainly has a different amount of money in their wallet, and undoubtedly takes a different amount of time to get ready in the morning than you do. You should distinguish between a variable, such as gender, and its value for an individual observation.

All variables should have an Operational definition, a universally accepted meaning that is clear to all associated with an analysis. Without operational definitions, confusion can occur. For instance, 2000 U.S. presidential election and the disputed ballots in the state of Florida. A review of 175,010 Florida ballots that were rejected for either no presidential votes or votes for two or more candidates was conducted with the help of the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago. Nine standards or operational definitions were used to evaluate these ballots. The nine standards led to different results. Three of the standards let to margins of victory for George Bush that ranged from 225 to 493 votes. Six of standards let to margins of victory for A1 Gore that ranged from 42 to 171 votes.
Now, that variable have been defined, you need to understand the meaning of population, sample, parameter, and statistic later soon in next articles.