Sample

See: Sampling. Given that it’s a half hour before lunch, the only samples we can focus on are the free pizza bite samples from our food vendor in the break room. But in terms of statistics, a sample is a smaller group that we select from the entire population for the purposes of using data collected from the sample to help us understand something about the population. Sometimes getting data on the whole population is impossible (because it might have, oh, 300 million members or so, and we haven’t been granted superspeed...yet), so we grab a sample from that population and do our data collection there.