what does it mean by "mean, median & mode of a distribution"?

Question

why will mean be affected by extreme scores, can anyone give some examples of the scores??
is median & mode also affected by the extreme scores???why or why not?

So, the extreme scores can be of any value. Is that right?

Answer 1

Mean is the average of the data.
Median is the middle number (if placed in ascending/descending order)
Mode is the number that appears the most.

Examples:

Let's say you are trying to discover the force of gravity by measuring the time it takes a car to roll down a ramp. You know the length of the ramp and the angle of the ramp and therefore, need only a good approximation of the time that it takes for the car to go down the ramp (your number will be low do to friction).

Let's say that these are the times that you got from 10 trials:


9.3
9.3
9.9
8.8
9.5
9.7
15.4 (the car came off the track and was slowed down a lot)
9.6
8.9
9.2

Then you would have had a mean of 9.96
a median of 9.4 (line them up in ascending oder 8.9, 8.9, 9.2, 9.3, 9.3, 9.5, 9.6, 9.7, 9.9, 15.4 and since there is an even number of data points, take the mean of the 5th and 6th)
and a mode of 9.3

Now 15.4 is obviously a bad point. Removing it we get:
a mean of about 9.7
a median of 9.3
and a mode of 9.3

So only the mean really changes, this is because the mode and median are designed to get rid of "bad" data points.

Answer 2

"Mean" is what people typically think of as the average. so if you have the numbers 5,5,10, 10, 100. the mean would be 5+5+10+10+100 / 5 = 28. The mean can be affected by extreme scores because it's value is included in the total. so as in this example, if the 100 was not included, the mean would be 7.5 instead of 28.

"Median" is basically the number in the middle. If you take a string of numbers, order then numerically, and the one in the middle is the median. For example in the set 1,2,3,4,5 The median would be 3 because it is the number directly in the middle.

"Mode" is the most common number. in the set 1,1,1,2,3,4,4,5,6 The mode would be 1 as it is the one that occurs most frequently. Mode is not affected by extreme scores.

Answer 3

Mean is the average and of course it's affected by extremes. Median is the exact middle of the scores when arranged in order, regardless of value. Median is affected by extreme scores because they add to the total number of scores and may change the middle. Mode is the most common number and is not affected by extremes.

Answer 4

mean = add all elements, divide by number of elements
median = arrange all elements in increasing (or decreasing) order, pick the one in the middle
mode = with all elements arranged, pick out the one that repeats the most often. In s { 2,3,3,4,5,5,5,6,7}, 5 is the mode [5 also happens to be the median]

mean is affected by extreme scores. take that set and add 144 to it. The mean will change dramatically.
median might or might not be changed. If the same number of extreme scores are added "to the front" and "to the back", the median does not change.
Mode might or might not be change. If only one extreme score is added, mode will not change. If several of the same extreme score is added, mode will change.

Answer 5

MEAN is average of numbers (ie. multiply all numbers together and divide by how many numbers there are)
MEDIAN is the middle number (after you put all of the numbers in order; if there is an even amount of numbers, take the average of the middle two numbers)
MODE is the number that appears the most times (there many be more than one)