Central
Tendencies of a Data Set – Topic 4
Mean,
Median and Mode
Material to Supplement MTH 110: Prealgebra Online
When
you collect a lot of data one of the first questions you ask yourself is,
“Where is the middle of these numbers?”
Interestingly, there are three different ways you can answer this
question. So, when groups are
throwing numbers around to prove a point to you they really can both say
different things and be correct. Complete
the following activities and you will learn what mean (what you have always
called average), median and mode are.
Activity
1:
This site gives straight-forward definitions.
In general the mode can be a bit tricky depending on if you have an even
or odd number of values. If it
doesn’t quite makes sense on this site, there will be others to visit. http://www.btinternet.com/%7Etang/gcserevision/mathematics/averages.html
Activity
2:
Visit http://www.omegamath.com/Data/d4.1.html
and do all the student interactive problems.
At the bottom of the site you will find a link to “Homework.”
Go there and complete these 45 problems.
Answers are included. You
may want to print out the answers and check your work as you go rather than do
all the problems and then check your work.
By the time you complete this work you will have learned how to find
mean, median and mode.
Click
here to go to Topic 5.