Measures of Spread – Additional Worksheet 1 (Outliers)

1.0 Using the following data

44 9 10 13 18 3 29 11 256 12 38

a) Calculate the mean and median for this data

b) Does the data contain an outlier? If so, drop the outlier and recalculate the
mean and median. Which of these two summary measures changes by a larger
amount when you drop the outlier?

c) Which is the better summary measure for this data, the mean or the median?
Briefly explain why.

2.0 The following data give the sale prices (in thousands of dollars) of a random sample
of 20 recently sold homes in London

605 789 50 881 499 675 700 543 910 808

1016 929 544 397 649 752 698 710 495 509

Prepare a box and whisker plot for this data, are there any outliers?
Measures of Spread – Additional Worksheet 1 (Outliers)

3.0 The following data give the time (in minutes) that each of 20 students from a
university waited in line at their bookstore to collect textbooks.

15 8 23 21 5 17 31 22 34 6
5 10 14 17 16 25 30 3 31 19

a) Prepare a box and whisker plot.

b) Calculate the summary statistics (mean, median, standard deviation and IQR)
c) Comment on the skewness of the data.