12.1+Average

Section 12.1 - Average
When you hear the term, average, I suspect you have some vague idea that suggests something in the middle, not an extreme example or something that is quite different from other things around it. If you walk into a classroom and I ask you to pick out the most average person in the room, what would you look for? How would you decide?

Whatever you choose to measure in the classroom would produce some data -- perhaps a list of numbers that describe heights of students, or grade point averages, or age. Perhaps it would be a list of categories, like hair color or gender, or clothing brands. What about the things that don't translate so easily into measurable data? Well, being math folks, we generally don't care so much about things we can't measure.

So we will focus on using mathematical formulas to find the "average" from a set of data. Trouble is, there are different ways to calculate average -- we will cover four different ways in this chapter. As you look at the different ways to calculate average, look for situations where one method might be better than another.

**Where to from here?**
12.1 Average 12.2 Mean 12.3 Median 12.4 Mode Chapter Twelve Summary Chapter Twelve Homework