To determine what people in California think about a proposed law, 5,000 people from the state are randomly surveyed. Of the people surveyed, 58% are against the law. The legislature concludes that the law should not be passed.

This is an unbiased, simple random sample because randomly selected Californians were surveyed. So, the conclusion is valid.

A magazine asks its readers to complete and return a questionnaire about popular television actors. The majority of those who replied liked one actor the most, so the magazine decides to write more articles about that actor.

The Student Council advisor asked every tenth student in the lunch line how they preferred to be contacted with school news. The results are shown in the table. Is this a random sample? If yes, suppose there are 684 students at the school. How many can be expected to prefer E-mail?

A store manager sends an E-mail survey to customers who have registered at the store’s Web site.

A school district surveys the family of every tenth student to determine if they would vote in favor of the construction of a new school building.