Question

A car dealer has used cars for sale for the following amounts:$3400, $3600, $3700, $3800, $3900, $4000, $4100, $4300, $7600 Which measure should be used to summarize the data?Mean, Median, Mode?

Answer 1

In general, if the data is not normally distributed, we should use the median to summarize it. In our case, the data distribution is approximately constant, except for the outlier of $7600; therefore, the data is not normally distributed and we need to use the median to summarize.

Calculate the median of the data set as shown below

$3400,3600,3700,3800,3900,4000,41000,4300,7600\rightarrow\text{ ordered from least to greatest, 9 elements in total}$$\Rightarrow median=5th\text{ term}=3900$

Thus, the answer is the median, which is equal to 3900.