Mean, Mode, Range, and Median?

In my class we reviewed vocabulary and concepts that are used in statistics: Mean, median, mode, and range. When I was younger I would make shortcuts to remember what each meant. Mean was the meanest out of the four because it would make me do the most work. Median would mean middle because the meaning is in the word. Mode would stand for most. Then Range would mean the distance just like a shooting range.

However, I didn't realize that in certain situations it is better to use one rather than all of them. In class we did an activity as a class and the teacher made a dot plot out of the data of the class. We saw that 8 was the mode and the median, but the mean was 9. Right now those numbers seem insignificant, but it would make a tremendous difference if it involved money. If I had a shoe business, I would look at the mode because I would be able to see from the sample that many people have size 8 shoes. Then I would make my shoe factory make the shoes, but I would want the average of how many shoes the factory produces each day. If I had customers take a survey on how satisfy they are with the service, I would use median because numbers that are not close to the rest of the data would be eliminated, therefore generally knowing what the customers actually feel when they go to my shop.

Here is a game that can help you understand the basics of mean, median, mode, and range.