Question

The number of hours worked by the employees of Bob's Car Wash in one week are listed.

20, 40, 30, 36, 36, 40, 39, 36, 38

The mean is 35 hours per week and the median is 36 hours per week.

Which statement best explains why the mean is less than the median?

O

A. There are only 9 employees.

O

B. Nobody works more than 40 hours.

O

c. The smallest number is half the largest.

O

d. One worker works much fewer hours than everyone else.

PLEASE HURRY

Answer 1

Option D

One worker works for much fewer hours than everyone else

Explanation:

First of all, we will need to clarify the concepts.

The median of a distribution is the middle number in that distribution, after the values have been arranged in either an ascending or descending order.

The mean is a weighted average of a distribution.

The mean has the characteristic of usually being affected by extremely low or extremely high values.

In our case, we have a relatively low value in terms of hours worked. This means that in the distribution, the worker that worked only 20 hours, will affect the mean hours worked by all the workers, making it lower than the median value.

Means give better results, when used to analyse distributions with smaller ranges.