ShmoopTube

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And here's a shmoopy question for ya...

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In a class of 30 students, the following chart gives the number of students who had missed

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class, and the number of days out of an entire month during which they had done so.

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And here's the table or... uh... data set if we'd prefer to channel our inner nerd...

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The median number of days that the 30 students were absent was... what?

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Here are the potential answers:

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So, this question takes a big dental pick to reallllly

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dig in to see whether or not we understand the concept of Median.

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Remember that Median is Latin for "middle"... or at least the "med" part is.

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As in... medium.

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The "ian" part is like "radian" which kinda sorta means... "measure".

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So the question is really asking... what's the "middle measure" in this data set?

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Well, the brute force way to do this problem is to just

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lay out the numbers in front of us as we talk through them.

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And here's what that looks like:

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Now let's talk through the problem so we can understand what these evil testing people are asking...

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9 students -- goody two shoes -- missed NO classes.

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Not even on senior ditch day did they... ditch.

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There were 11 students who missed just ONE day. They might have actually been sick.

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There were a half dozen who missed 2 days, 2 party animals who missed 3 days,

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1 derelict who missed 4 days, and another super-derelict who missed 5.

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Now all you have to do is cross out the high and cross out the low.

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And you're left with the middle two terms, which are... ones -- that is...

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...term 15 and 16 which are the middle two terms in a data set of 30 elements.

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You don't need to average them -- well, you could -- but that'd be pretty dull, as 1 and

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1 averages to... uh, yeah... one.

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So the answer is B. Or 1. It's the loneliest number.

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