Question

What is the median of the data set? {17, 40, 23, 44, 44, 30} Enter your answer in the box.

Answer 1

To find the median of the data set, we must first order them from lowest to highest in increasing order. Let's rearrange them in that way:

{17, 23, 30, 40, 44, 44}

Then we begin by crossing one off from each side, until we get to the middle. However, we see that our middle here is both 30 and 40.

What we do in a case like this is add up the two numbers and divide by 2 (essentially find the mean of the two middlemost numbers). Let's do that now:

$30+40=70$

$\frac{70}{2}=35$

So now we know that the median of the set of data is 35.