CHOOSING THE BEST MEASURE: Suppose you applied to be a waiter or waitress at a l
ID: 3200139 • Letter: C
Question
CHOOSING THE BEST MEASURE: Suppose you applied to be a waiter or waitress at a local restaurant and asked the manager what a typical dinner shift was like. How might the manager describe the typical size of a party at a table? The mode would be useful, since there are a few repeated values. You might have an occasional table for 20, but, for the most part, parties consist of one to five people. What if you asked for the typical size of a check, so you could estimate your tips? The mode makes no sense, since you would not likely have many repeats, and the mean is easily distorted by that table for 20, but the median tells you that half the time you can expect to earn a certain amount of money in tips.
Now suppose you were a real estate agent and you were asked by a client about the "typical" home in a subdivision. Being the astute agent you are, you have gathered the following information on each house in the subdivision: Price, square footage, numbers of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, and age. What statistic (mean, median, or mode) would you use to describe each aspect of the typical home and why? Try to imagine the type of answers you would be giving your client based on your selections for a subdivision that has 100 homes with a wide variety of sizes and prices.
Explanation / Answer
Solution:
Here, we have to describe the measures for the variables price, square footage, numbers of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, and age of the home. For the variable price of the home, we would use the mean or average price of the home for describing the price of the particular house as prices would be different for different homes. Also, we would use the mean or average for describing the square footage of the homes as there is a variation in the area of the homes. We would use the mode for describing the number of bedrooms and number of bathrooms because mode would give us the better idea about the number of bedrooms or bathrooms the home have. We would use the median for describing the age of the home because median would explain the age better than the mean or mode.