1. preliminaries remember the setup: we (the raf in world war ii) want to know the number of warplanes fielded by the germans. that number is n. the warplanes have serial numbers from 1 to n, so n is also equal to the largest serial number on any of the warplanes. we only see a small number of serial numbers (assumed to be a random sample with replacement from among all the serial numbers), so we have to use estimation. question 1.1 is n a population parameter or a statistic? if we compute a number using our random sample that's an estimate of n, is that a population parameter or a statistic?