Question

PICK ONE of the following situations, decide whether the mean or the median would likely give a better sense of what is typical or representative of the data for the purpose that is described. Discuss your reasoning. (NOTE: If you pick scenario a, you are not limited to commenting on that scenario. You can comment on anyone's reasoning.) a. The starting salaries of a class of college graduates in which one of the graduates is drafted by the NFL. Prospective students would like a sense of the starting salary they might expect when they get a job after they graduate. b. The net weights of one type and size of boxes of laundry detergent produced at a factor over the course of a year. Government regulators would like to know if consumers who use the laundry detergent on a regular basis are getting the amount of detergent they have paid for in the long run. c. The number of turtle eggs in nests along a beach. Researchers estimate that 80% of all the turtle eggs will hatch and they want to estimate how many baby turtles there will be. give a paragraph to explain.

Answer 1

In scenario a, when we talk about salary of graduates, there can be wide range of data in it. We can generally take mean that is average of the salaries which will represent the average salary for prospective graduates. But this salary figure can be misleading if the range is very high. High and low salary figures will influence the mean value of salary and then mean will not represent correct measure of central tendency.
Therefore we will use median here. For that we will first arrange data of salaries in ascending order ( or descending order) then we will pick the middle salary which will represent the correct measure of central tendency in the given scenario.