When the news hit the seattle press in july of 1897, gold fever had spread to everyone, and old timers stoked the flames with their stories of uncles who had struck it rich back in the california days of '49. "but california was dry and warm," sam muttered as he readjusted his pack and trudged on through the biting snow of an alaskan february. his brother jake had insisted that an early start would get them to a claim just in time for the spring thaw of those golden creeks. what does the excerpt show about the historical context of the story? gold had been discovered previously in seattle. gold had been mined in north america before. gold was far less valuable than oil at this time.

a hypothesis is an expected answer to a question, usually based on some theory or prior research. hypothesis testing is a method of determining the viability of a hypothesis. let’s use the us presidential election as an example. there are many hypotheses (questions) about how people feel or whom they will vote for. the only way to know the 100% “truth” about the answers to these questions is to ask every single possible voter – something that is impossible, expensive, time consuming etc. instead, we take samples and use statistics to make “best guesses” about the answer to a particular hypothesis. we never know for sure if our conclusion is right at the time we accept/reject it, but these techniques, when used appropriately can get us close to the truth most of the time (which is a lot better than guessing, flipping coins or throwing darts to get answers).

the tricky part about hypothesis testing is that we have to think somewhat backwards about it – we have to test what is known as the “null hypothesis”. as an example, the hypothesis might be “obama is more popular than romney” while the null hypothesis is “there is no difference in popularity between obama and romney”. we focus on the null hypothesis because it tells us exactly what the expected value of our tests should be (obama popularity = romney popularity) and we can collect data and see if it comes out that way (see next section on “significance”). if it does, then we “accept the null hypothesis” and reject our original hypothesis. if the null hypothesis is disproven, we look at the data to see if our original hypothesis holds (obama> romney).

false articles of confederation, ultimately building a new government and new constitution with an executive, legislative, and judicial branch and a system of checks and balances.