Question

Quartiles are used in statistics to classify data. According to their name, how do they divide the data?

1) Into halves
2) Into quarters
3) Into thirds
4) Into fifths

Answer 1

Quartiles divide data into quarters or four equal parts, with the first quartile (Q1) being the median of the lower half, the second quartile (Q2) being the median of the entire data set, and the third quartile (Q3) being the median of the upper half.

Step-by-step explanation:

Quartiles are used in statistics to classify or divide the data into sections. The quartiles are the numbers that separate the data into quarters, meaning that they divide the data into four equal parts. The answer to the student's question is that quartiles divide the data into quarters. To find these quartiles, the data must first be ordered from smallest to largest. Once the data is ordered, the median, or second quartile (Q2), is identified as the middle number where half of the values are smaller and half are larger than the median. The first quartile (Q1) is the median of the lower half of the data, and the third quartile (Q3) is the median of the upper half of the data. In a given data set, these quartiles may or may not be part of the data itself.