Final answer:
Mary's score, which equals the lower quartile, indicates that 25% of students scored the same or lower than her. Therefore, her score was not among the top, but better than the bottom quarter of her peers.
Step-by-step explanation:
If Mary's score on the math test is equal to the lower quartile value of all the scores on the test, this indicates that her score is at the 25th percentile of the distribution of scores. In other words, 25% of the students scored the same or less than Mary, and 75% of the students scored higher. The lower quartile, also known as the first quartile (Q1), is the value that cuts off the lowest 25% of the data.
An example of interpreting quartiles in a given context is stating that if the first quartile for the time it took to finish a math exam was 35 minutes, this means that 25% of students completed the exam in 35 minutes or less. Therefore, in Mary's case, it is most likely true that her score is not among the top scores but it does surpass a quarter of her peers' scores. This implies that while Mary's performance might be seen as below average compared to the entire distribution, she did perform better than the bottom 25% of her peers.