Average
📚 What You'll Learn
- What average means: the typical amount that represents a set of data
- Converting all measurements to the same unit before adding
- Calculating total distance and dividing equally by number of trials
- Checking if your average makes sense within the range of data
In this video, let's go over calculating the average from a series of data.
In this example, we drove this vehicle for five different trials, and these are the distances that it went.
And now we need to calculate the average distance that it traveled. What does average mean? Average is the quantity or number that represents the typical amount of something.
In this case, the typical distance that the vehicle traveled.
In order to find out that typical distance we're first going to need to measure each of these distances.
In this table, you can see the measurements in meters and centimeters.
The next step is to calculate the total distance of all five trials. And in order to do that, we're going to need to add up all of these distances.
The only problem is that we're using two different units of measurements. So in order to add them up most easily, we need to convert all of these into meters, or convert them all into centimeters.
I'm going to choose to convert them all into centimeters.
And now, we can add them up to find the total distance for the five trials.
1,898 centimeters. That is the total for all five trials. We can think about that as a ratio.
Remember, when we find the average, we're trying to find one number that represents that typical distance. So to do that, let's divide that total for the five trials equally into five parts.
This means for the typical one trial, the vehicle traveled 379.6 centimeters. We can round that to the nearest centimeter.
And now for the final step, let's check whether an average of 380 centimeters makes sense.
It falls within the range of our data, so yes, it makes sense.