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Here's the boring, unshmoopily-voiced question for ya...

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The mode of the number of days in each month for a single non-leap year is:

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Here are the answers...

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Well, it's kind of a vocabulary test question, because if you know what "mode" is...

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Right off the bat we can cross out C, or 30.4,

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cause they're just trying to mess with us here.

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Since there is no month with 30.4 days in it... we can kick that incorrect answer to the curb.

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And would you look at that?

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Because we were able to eliminate one option,

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we've now given ourselves a 1 in 3 chance of being right.

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Now for those two big fat Greek terms... mode and leap year.

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If we don't know 'em, we're probably going to be hosed for this problem.

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Remember that leap year happens because we add a day to our year

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every 4 years so that the Earth can catch up in its... race around the sun.

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So every four years, we... leap... by adding a February 29th.

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But the biggie vocab word we have to know here is mode.

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Mm... delicious, but... no.

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The mode we are concerned with is defined as the most commonly

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occurring value in a data set.

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In this problem, the data set we are working with is... months during a single non-leap year.

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So here's a little trick to find out how many days there are in each month.

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After we teach it to you, you'll know the months like... the backs of your hand.

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All the knuckles are 31 day months and the spaces in between them are 30 day months.

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Obviously, February is an exception. He just has to be difficult.

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Since we are looking for the MODE, or the most commonly occurring value, let's group

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all of our numbers together to see how many times each number occurs.

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We see that we have one 28 day month, four 30 day months, and seven 31 day months.

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So what's the most common term in this data set?

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Yup. Piece o' cake... a la mode.

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31. It occurs seven times...

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We didn't even need to worry about that whole leap year thing...

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it was just there to throw us off our game.

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Anyway, our correct answer choice is D.

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