Question

The following data set is sorted in ascending order:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105
The median of this data is 6 and the mean is 48.7. Which of these two measures will change the most if the outlier -600 is added to the list?
A. The median
B. The mean
C. Cannot be determined

Answer 1

In statistics, the mean is the average of all data. You sum up all the data and divide to the number of data. Median, on the other hand, is just the middle term of the data when arranged from least to most.

So the measure that would change most is the mean. The new mean would be -5.82. While the new median would just move to the next data point which is 101.