Statistics has three main meanings derived from its Latin and Italian roots referring to political states. 1. In plural form, it refers to facts that are systematically arranged in ascending or descending order. 2. Singularly, it is the branch of mathematics dealing with collection, summarization, and analysis of data. 3. It also refers to values obtained from samples that are used to draw inferences about a population. Key terms are population (the total group), parameter (unknown values in a population), sample (a subset of a population), and statistic (a known value from a sample).