It's Poll Week, Apparently

[thefourthvine]

My nine-year-old nephew has to do a ridiculous poll for his math class, and he needs lots of responses. It's one question. Anyone feel like taking it? Please? I would thank you! My sister would thank you! My nephew would also thank you!

(Added bonus humor for anyone who has ever taken a math class: his teacher assigned this question, and also assigned him to determine the mean, mode, and median of answers. If you take it, you'll see why we are all deeply amused by this. Statistics: UR TEACHIN IT RONG.)

ETA: SurveyMonkey broke! The question was as follows:

[Poll #1354750]

Feel free to take it if you haven't already, and thanks again!

Comments

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

...If they didn't teach you mode and median, what DID they teach you? That's about the most basic statistics in the world.

Because I am better than your textbook, here's all you need to know about mode and median:

The mode is the value that occurs most frequently in a set. It's the only thing my nephew can actually find with this data set, and in this case it's green. If we were using a data set like 2,6,1,9,3,8,6,3,7,8,3,5,3 then the mode would be 3.

The median is the number that's in the middle of the set; half the numbers are higher than the median and half are lower. So, in our set above, we would re-order numerically:

1,2,3,3,3,3,5,6,6,7,8,8,9

And take the middle number, so the median is 5. (If you have an even number of values, then you generally average the two middle ones to get the median, though not always.)

[neery.livejournal.com]

They did TRY to teach us mode and median! My textbooks has about ten paragraphs on each. It's just that none of it makes any sense. I just checked again, now that I knowwhat it actually is, and nope, I still don't understand what they're going for there. Thank you for the explanation!