The student government at the University of Wisconsin in Madison conducts a study about alcohol abuse among students. One hundred of the 43,193 members of the student body are sampled and asked to complete a questionnaire. One question asked is, “On how many days in the past week did you consume at least one alcoholic drink?”

(a) Identify the population of interest.

(b) For the 43,193 students, one characteristic of interest was the percentage who would respond “zero” to this question. This value is computed for the 100 students sampled.

Is it a parameter or a statistic? Why?