Question

The following table represents the running times of the men's 100 meters final at the London Olympics.

Can this data be fit in to a normal distribution?

What is the standard deviation of the times of the first seven runners?

Answer 1

No it can not be fit into standard distribution.

The standard deviation is 155.96

Explanation:

Standard Deviation:

1. Calculate Mean

2. Subtract the mean from each value in the data set

3. Square the differences

4. Take the average

5. Take the square root of the variance(average)

Answer 2

This cannot be fit into a normal distribution. While the first 7 runners all have times relatively close, the time of the last runner is an outlier, as it is too far from the other data points. The standard deviation is calculated by taking the mean, subtracting each value from the mean, squaring the deviations, adding these, then dividing by the number of data points (7), and taking the square root. This gives an answer of SD = 0.1107.