Mean, Median & Mode

How many hours did you work this week? This is a good question for the answers to be put on a line plot because the answers are numerical.

What is your favorite color? This is not a good question for the answers to be put on a line plot because the answers are not numerical.

The question How old am I? only gives one answer, your age. The question How old are the students in my school? provide a data point for each student in the school. The question How old are the students in my school? is a better question for data collection because it results in lots of data.

The measurements of the fish go from 4 [ggfrac]1/2[/ggfrac] inches to 6 [ggfrac]1/2[/ggfrac] inches. 6 inches is the most frequent length of a fish. None of the fish measured less than 4 [ggfrac]1/2[/ggfrac] inches, and no fish measured more than 6 [ggfrac]1/2[/ggfrac] inches.

The most frequent answer is 4 letters in the first name. If I randomly choose a person in this group, I think their answer would most likely be 5. If I make a list of the numbers in the answers, it has 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The number in the middle of this list is 5, so I think the answer would most likely be 5.

The three measures of center are mean, median, and mode. The mean is the average of a set of data. The median is the middle number in an ordered set of data. The mode is the data value that appears most often.

Outliers have a significant effect on the mean, so it would be better to use the median as a measure of center.

Add the numbers in the data set and divide by the number of data points in the set, in this case 10. The mean is 83°F.

List the populations in order from least to greatest. Find the value that is in the middle of the list. That is the median. The median of this data is 135.9 thousand.

I would look for the measurement that appeared most often. 2.3 m appears two times and the other measurements appear one time each. 2.3 m is the mode.