This course is a compulsory and core course for those students majoring in statistics. It is also a basic course for further study on modern statistics theory and methods, and a powerful tool which has to be grasped for major theory and practical applications.

Statistics is a discipline which studies how to collect data efficiently, how to infer or predict for the problems that we are interested, hence provides information and basis for decision and action. It has been widely used. By learning this course, the students should achieve the following goals：

1. Understand the basic concepts and statistical thinking, the types of a plenty of real problems and the relations with statistics.

2. Being able to solve some real problems by using regular statistical methods and combining the knowledge of math, probability.

3. Preliminary understand the new development in the research fields on statistics and develop statistical thinking.