Question

Lauren is a college sophomore majoring in business. This semester Lauren is taking courses in accounting, economics, management information systems, public speaking, and statistics. The sizes of these classes are, respectively, 350, 70, 65, 50, and 60.(a) Find the mean and the median of the class sizes.
(b)What is a better measure of Lauren's "typical class size"? The mean or the median?

Answer 1

Answer:

a) We can calculate the mean with the following formula:

$\bar X = \frac{\sum_{i=1}^n X_i}{n}$

And replacing we got:

$\bar X= \frac{350+ 70+ 65 +50+ 60}{5} =119$

And for the median first we need to order the dataset on increasing way:

50, 60, 65, 70, 350

Since the sample size is an odd number we can calculate the median as the middle position for the dataset, for this case the 3th position and we got:

Median = 65

b) For this case we can see that we have an outlier present in the data 350, and for this case if we want to give a measure of central tendency is better use the median since this meaure is not affected by outliers. So Lauren should use the median.

Step-by-step explanation:

For this case we have the following data:

350, 70, 65, 50, 60

Part a

We can calculate the mean with the following formula:

$\bar X = \frac{\sum_{i=1}^n X_i}{n}$

And replacing we got:

$\bar X= \frac{350+ 70+ 65 +50+ 60}{5} =119$

And for the median first we need to order the dataset on increasing way:

50, 60, 65, 70, 350

Since the sample size is an odd number we can calculate the median as the middle position for the dataset, for this case the 3th position and we got:

Median = 65

Part b

For this case we can see that we have an outlier present in the data 350, and for this case if we want to give a measure of central tendency is better use the median since this meaure is not affected by outliers. So Lauren should use the median.