Question

Which of the following lists of data has the smallest standard deviation? Hint: you should not need to compute the standard deviation for each list.Select the correct answer below:11, 17, 9, 4, 4, 6, 6, 9, 8, 1829, 21, 21, 28, 28, 26, 24, 24, 17, 236, 8, 10, 6, 8, 8, 10, 7, 10, 1023, 19, 12, 19, 17, 18, 16, 10, 12, 2117, 12, 6, 6, 15, 16, 20, 20, 5, 17

Answer 1

Standard deviation is an important measure of spread or dispersion. It tells us how far, on average the results are from the mean.

The smallest standard deviation belongs to the dataset with the smallest range and almost no outliers. Closer the values are to the mean, less the value of the standard deviation.

Comparing those datasets, the one that fits this description is the third one.

`\lbrace6,8,10,6,8,8,10,7,10,10\rbrace`