Application of Averages

Lessons

1. A school collected gifts from students to give to needy children in the community over the Christmas holidays. The following numbers of gifts were collected.
   

   Grade	Total number of gifts collected
   1	65
   2	100
   3	70
   4	54
   5	45
   6	54
   7	43

   1. What are the median and mean? Round your answer to the nearest whole number.
   2. Which value is an outlier?
   3. Which measure of central tendency better describes the data? Explain why.
2. The following table represents the sizes of winter boots that were sold last week.
   

   Size	5	6	7	8	9	10
   Number Sold	3	2	4	4	0	1

   1. What are the mean and mode sizes of shoes sold? Round your mean to the nearest whole shoe size.
   2. If you were in charge of ordering in more boots, which measure of central tendency is more meaningful? Why?
3. In a running race, the mean time was 2 minutes; the mode time was 2 minutes and 10 seconds; and the median time was 1 minute and 55 seconds. Jack had a time of 2 minutes. Which measure of central tendency (mode, median or mean) would you use to make Jack feel like he could do better?