The difference between the mean and median can be explained by considering the age of 3 different people. Let’s consider an old woman of age 92, a small child of 4 and a middle aged man of 40.
We can calculate their mean or average age by summing their different ages together and dividing that sum by the amount of members of the population in question, which in this case is 3. In excel we can either sum the ages together first and then divide by 3 OR we can simply use the average formula and select the data range we are interested in like so. Then we see that the average age of this population is 45.33.
The median is even simpler to get. Now, we just sort the population from youngest to oldest and pick the value that is literally in the middle. This can be done easily in excel by using the sort function and then manually picking the middle value OR even simpler by just using the median function and selecting the data range of interest. Then we see that the median age of this population is 40.
5 окт 2024
