Answer: Choice D)
Determine the percentage of values occurring above and below that value
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Step-by-step explanation:
Let's go through the answer choices
- A) If we add up all the scores and divide by n, which is the number of scores, then we get the sample mean xbar. We can refer to this as simply the mean. This won't get us the percentile, so we can rule out choice A.
- B) Subtracting the max and min gets us the range. Range = max - min. We can rule out choice B.
- C) We can rule out choice C. The steps described here determine the mean absolute deviation (MAD) which is similar in nature to the standard deviation. It tells us how spread out the data set is, so it's somewhat related to the range as well. Unfortunately, we can't figure anything about percentiles with this.
- D) This must be the answer as there isn't anything left. Turns out this set of steps is the correct method to find the percentile. Technically all you need to do is the "below" portion and ignore the "above" portion of the statement. If we say "the 25th percentile is K", then that is another way of saying "25% of the data is below K".