Star Library: An Unusual Episode

This article describes an activity that illustrates contingency table (two-way table) analysis. Students use contingency tables to analyze the "unusual episode" (the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic)data (from Dawson 1995) and attempt to use their analysis to deduce the origin of the data. The activity is appropriate for use in an introductory college statistics course or in a high school AP statistics course. Key words: contingency table (two-way table), conditional distribution