STATISTICS

Question 1

what are three advantages of the mean

Answer 1

all data is used to find answer
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mathematical centre of a distribution
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basic calculation is easily understood and commonly used

Question 2

what is a disadvantage of the mean

Answer 2

it can be misleading as it is influenced by outliers meaning data can be skewed

Question 3

two advantages of the mode

Answer 3

easy to compute and understand
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not affected by outliers

Question 4

3 disadvantages of the mode

Answer 4

there may be no mode
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multiple modes can be difficult to interpret
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ignores most of data

Question 5

what are 3 advantages of the median

Answer 5

not influenced by outliers and skewed distributions
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good with ordinal data and can be used with any data type except nominal
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easier to compute than the mean

Question 6

what are 2 disadvantages to the median

Answer 6

takes a long time to calculate for a very large set of data
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cannot combine medians in statistical calculations

Question 7

two advantages of the interquartile range

Answer 7

better than the range as only refers to middle half of results so extremes are omitted and can’t affect the answer
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good for ordinal data

Question 8

two disadvantages of the interquartile range

Answer 8

more time consuming and harder to calculate
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doesn’t use all the data so doesn’t give a full picture of the data set

Question 9

2 advantages of standard deviation

Answer 9

shows how much data is clustered around the mean value
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gives a more accurate figure than the range because it takes into account all values