Question

Question: A Whole Foods cashier recorded the number of items purchased by 12 consecutive customers:

12   25   32   17   22   19   16   25   18   24   18   23

a)    For this data set, find the mean, median, and mode. Show your calculations. Round answers to the nearest tenth.

b)   Which of these averages best represents the data? Explain your answer.

Answer 1

Solution:

a)

The mean of a data set is the sum of the terms divided by the total number of terms.

Formula:

Mean = 20.9167

The median is the middle number in a sorted list of numbers. So, to find the median, we need to place the numbers in value order and find the middle number.

Ordering the data from least to greatest, we get:

12   16   17   18   18   19   22   23   24   25   25   32

The mode of a set of data is the value in the set that occurs most often.

12   16   17   18   18   19   22   23   24   25   25   32

Since both 18 and 25 occur 2 times, the modes are 18 and 25 ( this data set is bimodal).

b) Here mean and median are almost close. So we can consider either mean or median as the best representation of the data. As there are no more variation in the data so median may prefer here most representative.

Done