Recall that in the “resampling with replacement” scenario we are illustrating here, both of these histograms have a special name: the bootstrap distribution of the sample mean. Furthermore, recall they are an approximation to the sampling distribution of the sample mean, a concept you saw in Chapter 7 on sampling. These distributions allow us to study the effect of sampling variation on our estimates of the true population mean, in this case the true mean year for all US pennies. However, unlike in Chapter 7 where we took multiple samples (something one would never do in practice), bootstrap distributions are constructed by taking multiple resamples from a single sample: in this case, the 50 original pennies from the bank.