Book excerpt: The Basic Practice of Statistics has become a bestselling textbook by focusing on how statistics are gathered, analyzed, and applied to real problems and situations—and by confronting student anxieties about the course’s relevance and difficulties head on. With David Moore’s pioneering "data analysis" approach (emphasizing statistical thinking over computation), engaging narrative and case studies, current problems and exercises, and an accessible level of mathematics, there is no more effective textbook for showing students what working statisticians do and what accurate interpretations of data can reveal about the world we live in. In the new edition, you will once again see how everything fits together. As always, Moore’s text offers balanced content, beginning with data analysis, then covering probability and inference in the context of statistics as a whole. It provides a wealth of opportunities for students to work with data from a wide range of disciplines and real-world settings, emphasizing the big ideas of statistics in the context of learning specific skills used by professional statisticians. Thoroughly updated throughout, the new edition offers new content, features, cases, data sources, and exercises, plus new media support for instructors and students—including the latest version of the widely-adopted StatsPortal. The full picture of the contemporary practice of statistics has never been so captivatingly presented to an uninitiated audience.