Final answer:
Besides mean and median, other ways to describe the shape and spread of a dataset include range and interquartile range, variance and standard deviation, mode and skewness, and frequency and histogram.
Step-by-step explanation:
In addition to mean and median, we can describe the shape and spread of a dataset using the following:
a) Range and Interquartile Range: The range is the difference between the maximum and minimum values of the dataset, and the interquartile range is the difference between the third quartile and the first quartile.
b) Variance and Standard Deviation: Variance measures how far each number in the dataset is from the mean, and standard deviation is the square root of the variance.
c) Mode and Skewness: Mode identifies the most frequent value(s) in the dataset, and skewness measures the asymmetry of the distribution.
d) Frequency and Histogram: Frequency represents the number of times each value occurs in the dataset, and a histogram is a graphical representation of the frequency distribution.
Two sets of data with the same number of elements can have the same median and mean but look different in terms of their shape and spread. For example, one set of data might have a symmetrical distribution with values closely clustered around the mean, while the other set might have a skewed distribution with a few extreme values that pull the mean away from the median.