Today we will cover the definition of Mean.
In any given set of numbers the mean is the sum of those numbers all divided by how many numbers there are in a given set. Mean is a statistical term but it is also commonly referred to as the average.
Mean Is The Same As Average
When will you deal with mean? Mean will be used as a way to try and describe any set or group of numbers. This can be in statistics, or you can even pull data from charts, like histograms and line plots and calculate the mean. This will teach you more about the data set.
An Example of Finding the Mean
For the data set: 15, 10, 19, 19, 7, 11, 15, 19, 20, 12, 17, and 18, how would we find the mean? Unlike the mode, you can’t just look at this data set and “see” the mean. But, on the other hand, unlike the median, you don’t have to order the numbers from least to greatest. You can leave them how they are. But we do have to do some calculation.
The sum of all the numbers is 182, and we count that there are 12 individual numbers represented. 182 divided by 12 gives us a mean of 15.17. Don’t freak out when you see a decimal number for the mean. It’s actually more common to get a decimal number than a whole number when you calculate the mean of a set of numbers.
In Review:
The mean is the average of all the numbers in a data set. We add the numbers and divide by how many numbers were in the group.