ShmoopTube

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Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by whiny professional athletes everywhere.

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One student notes that from looking at Figure 1, he can tell that most players make much

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more than the minimum salary. Why is this student mistaken?

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Here are the potential answers...

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We're going to be honest with you.

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This is a tricky question. It's easy to answer this question wrong if you don't look at

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it really carefully. A lot of people might solve the problem like this:

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if we look at figure 1...it looks like the red: average salary, is a lot larger than

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the green: the minimum salary. So the student "might not be mistaken".

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But oh he would. Just by looking at this bar graph, we can't tell how many

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players actually make up the data in any of the years. All we know is the AVERAGES.

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So let's think about it. Say we had salaries of 10, 10, 10, 10, and 1000. Because of that

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one high value, the average turns out to be 208, which is a lot higher than what

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the proper average is...which is about 10. The same case applies to the graph we have.

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The average salary could be much higher than the minimum salry because a few individuals

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with high salaries are skewing the data. The correct answer is (C).

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