Mean, Median and Mode

Question

Your neighbor teaches math at your local elementary school. This week, her students are being introduced to the concepts of mean, median, and mode. The students have been asking, “Why do we need to learn these things? We will never use them in real life.” Your neighbor needs your help responding to this complaint.

Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

1. Without using the word “average” or any mathematical equations, describe how you might respond to the elementary school students.  

Answer 1

Statistics helps us understand randomness. Everything we encounter has an element of randomness. Roll a die many times - it seems like we can say nothing about the outcomes - but we can use statistics to understand general patterns. Statistics is a pattern. A mean is where the data “bunches” up, the median is the value that sits in the middle - the median represents the middle result, the mode is the most frequently observed value. We can completely predict the outcomes of random events, but we can estimate some general patterns, and that allows us to account for and manage the aspects of random events which we can estimate. Casinos, the stock market, earthquakes, etc.