Question

The dot plot displays the number of books read by students during the semester.

B
. Which measure of center would you use given the shape of the distribution in the dot plot? Explain your reasoning
Type your response in the space below.

567 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
number of books read

Answer 1

Answer: Median

Reason:

The large outlier 13 pulls on the mean to make it larger than it should be. The distribution is skewed to the right (aka positively skewed). This will tell us that mean > median.

Recall that the median is not affected by outliers. So whenever we have outliers, big or small, we go for the median to best represent the center.