Sentence:  They discovered that , although 42 per cent of a <WSD>sample</WSD> of Catholic students and 15 per cent of the Protestants believed it important to live in accordance with the teachings of their religion , only 8 per cent of the Jewish students had this conviction . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  items selected at random from a population and used to test hypotheses about the population