Question

1) What type of data (discrete or continuous) is each of the following variables?

a) Length of a movie at Green Country Cinemas.

b) Number of Hershey’s Kisses in an one pound bag.

c) Flight time from Philadelphia to Tulsa.

Answer 1

A variable is said to be discrete if it can take a countable number of values and a variable is said to continuos if it takes infinite number of values.

a) Length of a movie at Green Country Cinemas- It is a continuous variable since it can take infinite number of values as the movies are of all lengths.

b) Number of Hershey’s Kisses in an one pound bag- It is a discrete variable since the number of Hershey's kisses are countable in number

c) Flight time from Philadelphia to Tulsa: It is continuous variable since it is time and can take infinitely many values.

Note - In part a and c time is being referred we can break time in infinitely small unit (eg 2.111111179872sec) so it can be measured accurately and hence for time there are infinitely many values and thereafter it is continuous variable