Stated informally, Statistics is the process of describing characteristics of a sample of objects of interest.
Statistics has two basic levels of activity - descriptive and inferential .
Descriptive statisitics is concerned with describing the sample . Inferential statistics is concerned with checking the plausibility of specific hypotheses against a sample. The formal tools used in both types of Statistics come from Probability . Stated informally, Probability is the branch of Mathematics concerned with modeling the likelihood of the occurrence of events . Probability models describe the likelihoods of specific events associated with specific processes.