What is an average, and how do mean, median, and mode differ?
Three Sibling Averages
What is an average, and how do mean, median, and mode differ?
Imagine a row of houses where everyone owns a slightly different number of socks. Some folks have three, some have nine, one wild soul has forty. Now someone asks, "So... how many socks does a typical person around here have?" That single, tidy number you're reaching for has a name: an average. An average is just a way of squishing a whole crowd of numbers down into one number that stands in for the group.
But here's the twist that trips everyone up. There isn't just one kind of average. There are three different ways to find that "typical" number, and they're like three siblings who answer the same question very differently. Their names are mean, median, and mode. Let's meet them one at a time.
