Understanding Standard Deviation Like You're 5
Imagine you and your friends have different amounts of candies. Here’s how many each of
you has:
- You have 2 candies
- Ali has 4 candies
- Sara has 6 candies
- Omar has 8 candies
- Lina has 10 candies
We want to find out how 'spread out' the candies are. Let’s go step by step!
Step 1: Find the Average (Mean)
The average is like sharing all the candies equally among your friends.
1. Add all the candies together: 2 + 4 + 6 + 8 + 10 = 30
2. Now, divide by the number of friends (which is 5): 30 ÷ 5 = 6
So, on average, each friend has 6 candies.
Step 2: Find the Distance from the Mean
Now, we check how far each friend is from the average (6).
- You (2 candies) → 2 - 6 = -4
- Ali (4 candies) → 4 - 6 = -2
- Sara (6 candies) → 6 - 6 = 0
- Omar (8 candies) → 8 - 6 = 2
- Lina (10 candies) → 10 - 6 = 4
Since we don’t like negative numbers, we square each difference:
- (-4)² = 16
- (-2)² = 4
- (0)² = 0
- (2)² = 4
- (4)² = 16
Step 3: Find the Variance
To find variance, we add up all the squared differences and divide by the number of friends:
(16 + 4 + 0 + 4 + 16) ÷ 5 = 40 ÷ 5 = 8
So, variance = 8.
Step 4: Find the Standard Deviation
The standard deviation tells us how much the candies vary from the average.
To find it, we take the square root of the variance:
√8 ≈ 2.83
So, the standard deviation is 2.83.
Step 5: Find the Upper and Lower Bound
The upper and lower bound help us see where most of the numbers fall.
- Lower Bound = Mean - Standard Deviation = 6 - 2.83 = 3.17
- Upper Bound = Mean + Standard Deviation = 6 + 2.83 = 8.83
This means that most of the numbers will be between 3.17 and 8.83.
Final Summary (In Simple Words!)
- The average number of candies is 6.
- Some have more, some have less, so we measure how far each person is from the average.
- The numbers don’t spread too far; most fall between 3.17 and 8.83.
- The standard deviation is 2.83, which tells us how much variation there is.
Now, if your teacher asks, “How spread out are the numbers?”, you can say:
"The numbers mostly stay between 3.17 and 8.83, and the standard deviation is 2.83!"
