Answer:
Step-by-step explanation:
The standard deviation is the square root of the variance, and the variance is found by using the mean. So we will do that first. I will use the population variance as opposed to the sample variance since our set of numbers is small.
The mean: 8 + 12 + 15 + 17 + 18 = 70 and divide that by 5 to get
and use this to find the variance in the formula:
it is a bit difficult to enter that formula in correctly, but here's how it works mathematically:
Squaring this ensures us that we don't end up with zero, which would be useless.
so
which means that the standard deviation is
s = 3.633
(If you do it with n-1 = 4 in the denominator of the variance, you get a standard deviation of 4.062)