Average/Median

Thanks for the helpful explanations.

I left school 18 years ago, and if I was taught what mean and median averages are, I've certainly forgotten since. Hardly the end of the world though! ;)

Thanks again.
 
Well I've gone 50 years and I've yet to be in a situation where anybody has mentioned range, median, mean or modal in normal conversation.
To say they are words that should be common is BS.
 
Median is a word I've rarely encountered outside of education. It's the kind of word I would expect to be (relatively) more common in printed media (e.g. scientific papers etc) as opposed to oral communication.

In relation to (national) house prices there probably isn't a huge difference between the mean and the median because it has a reasonably large sample size. This means that the mean isn't overly influenced by a handful of extremely expensive properties.
 
markyp23 said:
Well I have yet to meet one.

There are lots of things that I don't know about in fields that I don't care about and I don't go out of my way to learn about them because you can't know everything.

You'll notice the OP has managed to go 18 years without having to use it - hardly useful.
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I could go through my entire career without needing to know where Russia is on the world map but I'd still consider someone to be badly educated/a bit thick if they couldn't locate it.

Not knowing very basic mathematics is just as dumb IMO though in general it does seem to be more socially acceptable which is rather worrying. I guess it does go to show why a large portion of the population of this country can't manage their personal finances properly.
 
dowie said:
Not knowing very basic mathematics is just as dumb IMO though in general it does seem to be more socially acceptable which is rather worrying.
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That is a good point. I seems socially acceptable to admit being rubbish at maths, far more so than being rubbish at spelling or grammar for example. Why is it perfectly acceptable to be ignorant of basic mathematics? It's a sorry state of affairs really.
 
Mean is an average of all the values, it is easily thrown off by very large and very small values, it is therefor an unreasonable measure when the data set has a high S.D

Median measures the middle value in a data set, it cannot be thrown off by either extremities, it would be a good measure of house prices in the whole country rather than a neighbor hood.
 
Tefal said:
I'm curious how that site ordered the words?
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WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®.
http://www.wordcount.org/about.html
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markyp23 said:
People do not need to know what a median is to manage their finances properly. Just like I don't need to know where Yukoslavia is to drive from one end of town to the other.
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I think you're missing my point - I'm talking about lack of mathematical knowledge in general not being stigmatized in the same way that lack of basic knowledge in other areas would be.
 
dowie said:
I think you're missing my point - I'm talking about lack of mathematical knowledge in general not being stigmatized in the same way that lack of basic knowledge in other areas would be.
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because if you can't spell it's more noticeable than if you can't maths that no one ever asks you to do.
 
dowie said:
I could go through my entire career without needing to know where Russia is on the world map but I'd still consider someone to be badly educated/a bit thick if they couldn't locate it.

Not knowing very basic mathematics is just as dumb IMO though in general it does seem to be more socially acceptable which is rather worrying. I guess it does go to show why a large portion of the population of this country can't manage their personal finances properly.
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I think you've gone a little too far.

The fact that I didn't understand the difference between mean and median averages means nothing other than I either forgot what I had been taught a long time ago, or had never been taught.

I am certainly far from unintelligent - I couldn't do the job I do if I were. There's certainly nothing wrong with the state of my finances either!
 
markyp23 said:
Lack of knowledge in other areas isn't stigmatized.

People talk very basic English - check.
People don't know about their history - check.
People can only do basic sums - check.
People don't know about other places - check.

People only know how to do the things they do in their jobs/do every day - check.
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I'd hate to encounter the sort of people you hang around with then.
 
The Mad Rapper said:
I think you've gone a little too far.

The fact that I didn't understand the difference between mean and median averages means nothing other than I either forgot what I had been taught a long time ago, or had never been taught.

I am certainly far from unintelligent - I couldn't do the job I do if I were. There's certainly nothing wrong with the state of my finances either!
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I never implied there was anything wrong with your finances.

I still think it was a dumb question though.
 
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