Question

You want to find the average cost of the transportation you used.

Train tickets: $8.50
Coach tickets: $7
Bus tickets: $5.70
Taxi fares: $9
Flight tickets: $180

The mean average is given as $42.04.
Which cost distorted the data?

Answer 1

The flight ticket was the outlier in this set of data. Every other ticket cost under $10, but the flight cost was $180. This pulled the average value of each ticket way out to the right, increasing it by over 5 times, when the average value of the other four tickets was under $8 each.