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ACT Science 1.7 Data Representation Passage 254 Views


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ACT Science: Data Representation Passage Drill 1, problem 7. Why is this student mistaken?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:03

Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by whiny professional athletes everywhere.

00:11

One student notes that from looking at Figure 1, he can tell that most players make much

00:16

more than the minimum salary. Why is this student mistaken?

00:21

Here are the potential answers...

00:27

We're going to be honest with you.

00:28

This is a tricky question. It's easy to answer this question wrong if you don't look at

00:32

it really carefully. A lot of people might solve the problem like this:

00:35

if we look at figure 1...it looks like the red: average salary, is a lot larger than

00:40

the green: the minimum salary. So the student "might not be mistaken".

00:44

But oh he would. Just by looking at this bar graph, we can't tell how many

00:48

players actually make up the data in any of the years. All we know is the AVERAGES.

00:56

So let's think about it. Say we had salaries of 10, 10, 10, 10, and 1000. Because of that

01:01

one high value, the average turns out to be 208, which is a lot higher than what

01:06

the proper average is...which is about 10. The same case applies to the graph we have.

01:11

The average salary could be much higher than the minimum salry because a few individuals

01:15

with high salaries are skewing the data. The correct answer is (C).

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