In fact, the histogram of sample means from 35 resamples in Figure 8.11 is called the bootstrap distribution. It is an approximation to the sampling distribution of the sample mean, in the sense that both distributions will have a similar shape and similar spread. In fact in the upcoming Section 8.7, we’ll show you that this is the case. Using this bootstrap distribution, we can study the effect of sampling variation on our estimates. In particular, we’ll study the typical “error” of our estimates, known as the standard error.