Branson Creek Middle School has decided to make fitness a key message to their students in the upcoming school year. As a result, they will be participating in a national fitness program. To participate, they must randomly select 15 students in the 5th grade and record their exercise time each day. The data (in minutes) are shown.
85, 80, 76, 78, 82, 88, 80, 80, 110, 85, 85, 82, 83, 88, 76
Describe the distribution of the data.
Determine the median and mean of the data.
Which measure better represents a typical value in the data set? Explain.
The distribution of the data appears to be relatively symmetric with no significant outliers.
The median of the data is 82 minutes and the mean is 83.6 minutes.
In this case, the median may be a better representation of a typical value in the data set. This is because the mean is heavily influenced by the couple of very high values, which pull the mean up. Meanwhile, the median is less affected by outliers and represents the middle value of the data set.