What is another word for variable in science

**Synonyms**: Rows are also called *records*, *observations*, *trials* and probably a bunch of other things. It is quite important to know that each row is a country, so we have a name for this relationship we say that country is the the *statistical unit* in this data table. I've copied it down here again, this time highlighting one of its three rows. For example, the table above is about a collection of countries, so each row is a country. A data table represents a collection of things, and each individual thing is represented as a row. This line is called the 'header', and we'll get to that later. The very first line in that table says 'Country', 'Life Expectancy' and 'Income Per Person'. But don't worry about that if it sounds like Greek.* *What we're calling 'income per person' is technically gross-domestic product per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity and inflation. These columns and rows mean special things. Being this sort of grid, it has columns and rows. It has a grid with a value in each of the rectangular boxes.

Here's a data table about the wealth and health of nations. Today, I hope to teach you what all of these different words mean. When people like me work with tables so much, we come up with lots of fancy words to describe all of the different parts of a table. A lot of these methods expect data to be represented in data tables.

In order to understand how the world works, I collect data about it and then apply a bunch of fancy quantitative methods. You might be already learning R or python or D3, but today we're starting with the basics. This fall, Tom has generously lent his time to a project we're calling 'Ask A Data Scientist.' Got a question about your data? Ask Tom in the comments below. Tom also performs in the band CSV Soundsystem which makes music from spreadsheets. This post was written by Thomas Levine, data scientist and DataKind Ambassador.

What is another word for variable in science