Nursing Entrance Exam

Nursing Preparation Study Guide Example We are given the following data set of student ages in the general statistics class. You are asked to calculate the mean of our given population. 31, 33, 30, 31, 35, 33, 36, 28, 42, 37, 33 • Step 1: Find the sum of the observations. To do this we simply add all the ages together. 31+33+30+31+35+33 +36+28+42+37+33 = 369 369 is the sum of all the observations or the sum total of all of the student’s ages in our example population. Right now this number doesn’t tell us a lot of information so we need to move onto step 2. • Step 2: Determine the number of observations in the data set. For our example, we have 11 students in the class. So 11 is our number of observations. Now we can solve for the mean by taking 369 / 11 which gives us an average class age of 33.5 years you could round this number up to 34 years. • Important Points! o Many times you will be asked to calculate the average, remember the average is the same as the mean. o The number of observations can also be written as “ ”. The letter “ ” is just short-hand to denote the number of observations in a given data set. 4.2.2 Median The median is the middle value or number to a given set of numbers placed in order from smallest to largest. The median can be used to separate the data set into lower and upper values. The median is easily identified in number sets with an un-even amount of values. Example In a number set with 15 values, the median can be identified by counting equally from each end. The median would be the 8 th value. In even number sets, the median is calculated by adding the two middle values and dividing by two. Let’s look at our previous data set to determine the median. 31, 33, 30, 31, 35, 33, 36, 28, 42, 37, 33 • Step 1: Place the data set in order from smallest value to the largest value. Our ordered data set is: 28, 30, 31, 31, 33, 33, 33, 35, 36, 37, 42

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