Group Activity 4 Sports Injuries

All group activities must include a signed statement that all members of your group participated fully in the assignment.

Activity

1.     Open the file SportsInjuries.xls, which contains recent data on the number of participants in some of the most common sports in the US and the number of injuries related to that sport. Sort the data according to the number of injuries. According to the sorted data, of all the sports, which has the highest and lowest number of injuries? 

2.    Can you conclude that a sport with a high number of injuries is dangerous?  Why or why not?

3.    Fill column D with the rate of number of injuries per participant. Unlike a percent, a ratio or rate is left in decimal form. Increase or decrease the number of decimal places so that the rate has 4 decimal places.   Sort the data on column D. Of all the sports, which is the most and which is the least dangerous sports according to injury rate?

4.    Look at bowling and explain what its rate means. It may be helpful to write the rate as a fraction.

5.    Often, instead of per person (as a decimal point), rates are expressed as per 1000 people or per 100,000 people if the number divided by is very large.  Use what you said in question 4 to convert the rates in column D to number of injuries per 10,000 participants.  Fill column E with these values.  What is the rate per 10,000 for tennis?

6.    In a well written paragraph explain the different views you obtain by sorting by the number of injuries and sorting by the injury rate.  In your paragraph give an example of a sport whose ranking changes significantly when looking at absolute numbers and when looking at rates, and briefly explain how and why (mathematically speaking) the ranking of that sport changes. 

7.    Based on what we said in class about the differences among the types of relative quantities, why was a rate used in this activity and not a percent or ratio?