Can you have two medians

For example, if I ask you your favorite color and get word answers like red, blue, green, purple, it is impossible to add up those values to find the mean or to order the colors and find a median.

The only alternative to describe this set of data would be the mode. Then you can say that most people prefer red or whatever color occurs most. You probably will not be faced with having to make a decision about which measure of central tendency will be best for a particular data set. Most books will give you a set of numbers and ask you to compute mean, median, and mode.

But many students often wonder why there are three different values to be found from the same data set. This brief explanation gives you an idea of the different types of uses, just in case you were wondering. Let's Practice: Given the following data set, find the mean, median, and mode. Examples Find the mean, median, and mode for the data set. Find the mean, median and mode for the data set. Videos R Us keeps a record of how many movies are rented on each day of the week.

Find the mean, median, and mode for this data rounded to the nearest whole number. Site Navigation. Finding the Mean, Median, and Mode.

Now take and divide it by This gives the value for the mean to be To find the median, we have to make sure that the data set is in order. This data is already in order so we can proceed directly to finding the middle value.

In a data set with 15 numbers, the median will be the 8th value. The median for this data set is The mode is the value that occurs most often. Our middle is the eighth number: 3, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 21, 23 , 23, 23, 23, 29, 39, 40, 56 The median value of this set of numbers is It doesn't matter that some numbers are the same in the list. Example: 3, 13, 7, 5, 21, 23, 23, 40, 23, 14, 12, 56, 23, 29 When we put those numbers in order we have: 3, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 21, 23, 23, 23, 23, 29, 40, 56 There are now fourteen numbers and so we don't have just one middle number, we have a pair of middle numbers : 3, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 21 , 23 , 23, 23, 23, 29, 40, 56 In this example the middle numbers are 21 and Example: There are 45 numbers 45 plus 1 is 46, then divide by 2 and we get 23 So the median is the 23rd number in the sorted list.

Example: There are 66 numbers 66 plus 1 is 67, then divide by 2 and we get On the last exam, Section A's 10 students had A course has two sections, Section A and Section B. On the most recent exam, Section A's Jane has scores of 84, 92, and 89 on her first 3 exams. What does she need to score on the next The median is called a resistant measure, whereas the mean is a non-resistant measure. What's a See all questions in Measures of Center. Impact of this question views around the world.

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