My name is ramona geissler, i am a grade 12 student returning to school, and i actually have 2 questions.

1. How do you calculate the mean, median, and mode?
   
   
2. what are each of their definitions?

thank you very much

Ramona Geissler

Hi Ramona,

I will illustrate the definition of each of the terms mean, median and mode using the following set of numbers:

The mean of aÊset of numbers is also called the average of the numbers. To find the mean, you sum the numbers and divide by how many numbers make up the sum. In my example, the sum is 150 and there are 10 numbers, so the mean is  ¹⁵⁰/₁₀ = 15.

The median of aÊset of numbers is that number in the group such that half of the numbers are greater than that number and half of the numbers are less than that number. So if you wrote them in increasing order, it would be the number in the middle. This works well if you have an odd number of numbers in your set. If you have an even number, such as we do in my example, you take the mean of the two in the middle.

The mode of a set of numbers is the number or numbers that appear most often. In my set, 10 appears twice and 11 appears 3 times while all of the others appear only once. Thus, the mode is 11 since it appears most often.

Hope this helps,

Leeanne