According to the \"freshman 15\" legend, college freshmen gain 15 pounds (6.8 kg

Question

According to the "freshman 15" legend, college freshmen gain 15 pounds (6.8 kg) during their freshman year. Listed below are the amounts of weight change in kg for a simple random sample of freshmen included study. Positive values correspond to students who gained weight and negative values correspond to students who lost weight. Do these values appear to support the legend that college students gain 15 pounds during freshman year? Why or why not? What is mean, median and mode?
11 3 0 -2 3 -2 -2 5 -2 7 2 4 1 8 1 0 -5 2

Elementary Statistics by Triola 11ed 3-2 ex 12

Explanation / Answer

Put the values in increasing order:

-5 -2 -2 -2 -2 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 5 7 8 11

The mean is the average, so add up all of the values and divide that total by the number of values you have.

11+8+7+5+4+3+3+2+2+1+1+0+0-2-2-2-2-5 = 34

The number of values you have (include the 0 values since they are experimental data) is 18.

MEAN = 34/18 = 1.8889

Median is the central number you get when you order the values in order from lowest to greatest (or greatest to lowest). If you have an even number of values, take the two middle values and average them.

In this case, the two middle values are "1" and "2" (the second "1" and the first "2" going from left to right)

MEDIAN = (1 + 2) / 2 = 1.5

The mode of the values is the value that appears most often. Since there are 4 occurrences of "-2", which is the highest occurrence rate of all the values,

MODE = -2

These values DO NOT support the claim that college freshmen gain 15 pounds in their first year of college because the mean, median, and mode are nowhere near 15.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse A
• Subjects

---

---

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.