Practice: Mean, Median, Mode

These web-based activities were developed, during summer sessions from 1997 through 1999, by students at Mainland High School, located in Daytona Beach, FL. As part of Mainland's CCTT grant, the students were given permission by the book's publisher to convert the ancillary materials of the County's adopted Algebra 1 textbook (Glencoe Algebra 1 — ISBN: 9780028253282) into html format.

Practice

1. Numbers of students in French classes: 25, 18, 19, 23, 28, 20, 23, 17, 16, 24

2. Prices of a style of jeans at different stores: $45, $38, $36, $38, $38, $42, $36, $44

3. Passengers on a bus route: 75, 82, 96, 45, 48, 63, 90, 84, 78, 66, 67

4. Numbers of stories in downtown buildings: 16, 20, 22, 25, 18, 32, 28, 28

5. A consumer group found the following costs of a standard market basket of groceries at different stores in one large metropolitan area:

$105, $96, $108, $92, $102, $90, $92, $98, $100, $106, $98

a. Find the mean, the median, and the mode of the data.

b. Which of the three numbers that you found in part (a) best represents a typical price of the "market basket"?

6. The research department of an agricultural seed company tested two strains of soybeans, A and B, to see which strain would produce more soybean plants. Under identical conditions the two strains produced the following numbers of plants in the same period of time:

A: 50, 42, 38, 62, 44, 46, 40, 24, 44

B: 46, 68, 34, 30, 22, 46, 60, 44, 24

a. Find the mean, the median, and the mode of each set of data.

b. Does either data set (or both) contain values that seem to be exceptional?
(These are called "outliners.") Do you think that such values should be discarded?

c. Suppose you had only one soybean field and you had to plant either strain A or strain B. Which would you choose?
Is your choice based on the statistics you found in part (a)?

7. The diameters (in miles) of the nine planets in the solar system are given in the table below. Use this data to answer the following questions.

a. Find the mean and the median diameter of the planets.

b. Is Earth an "average size" planet by either of the statistics in part (a)? If so, by which one?

Planet	Mercury	Venus	Earth	Mars	Jupiter	Saturn	Uranus	Neptune	Pluto
Diameter	3030	7520	7930	4220	88,900	74,600	32,500	30,800	1430