What is it
Hypothesis testing is a formal statistical method for deciding whether evidence from sample data is strong enough to reject an assumption about a population, using a null hypothesis, an alternative hypothesis, and a significance level.
Why it matters
Hypothesis testing is the formal logic behind how scientific and medical claims are actually validated — 'is this drug effective' or 'is this coin fair' are both answered using exactly this framework in real research.
Exam tip
Always state your conclusion in the context of the original question, not just as 'reject' or 'do not reject' the null hypothesis — a conclusion without context rarely earns full marks, even with correct calculations.
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