Question

The arithmetic mean of a set of numbers is the sum of those numbers divided by the number of observations. Write a function called arithmetic_mean, which:

a) Takes as input a list of numbers.
b) returns the arithmetic mean of those numbers.
c) Note that for this implementation, you can assume the list contains only numbers.

Answer 1

To write a function called arithmetic_mean that calculates the arithmetic mean of a list of numbers, you can follow these steps.

Step-by-step explanation:

To write a function called arithmetic_mean that calculates the arithmetic mean of a list of numbers, you can follow these steps:

1. Define a function named arithmetic_mean that takes a list of numbers as an argument.
2. Use the sum() function to calculate the sum of all the numbers in the list.
3. Use the len() function to get the number of observations in the list.
4. Divide the sum by the number of observations to calculate the arithmetic mean.
5. Return the arithmetic mean as the output of the function.

Here is an example implementation of the arithmetic_mean function in Python:

def arithmetic_mean(numbers):
total = sum(numbers)
count = len(numbers)
mean = total / count
return mean

You can use this function by passing a list of numbers to it, like arithmetic_mean([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). It will return the arithmetic mean of the numbers, which in this case is 3.0.