EXAMPLE 3.2.9

A number of people invested $1000 each in the Gomer Family of Mutual Funds. The frequency table below shows the current values of those investments. Compute the mean, median and mode.

EXAMPLE 3.2.9 SOLUTION

First find n, the total number of people involved.

n = 48 + 42 + 31 + 28 + 22 = 171

Now find the mode.

mode = $0 because 0 is the value with the highest frequency.

Next we find the mean:

Finally we find the median. In order to do so, we first find the position of the "middle of the list."

The median will be the 86th number in the ordered distribution. We can locate the 86th number by counting frequencies::

The first 48 numbers in the distribution are 0s, and the next 42 numbers are 50s; in particular, the 86th number is 50.

The median is $50.