Thursday, July 26, 2012

What is a Mode in Math?

Math teacher, Ms Grace assigned the following number of problems for homework on 8 different days; 10, 12, 8, 10, 7, 10, 8, 10. Let us arrange the data in the increasing order, 7,8,8,10,10,10,10,12. What do you observe in the data? 10 is the number which is seen most number of times. This number 10, which occurs most often, is called the Mode in Math or Mode Math. So, Mode Definition Math would be, the Mode of a set of data is the value in the set that occurs most often (most number of times)

By definition, Statistics Mode or statistical mode is the value that occurs most frequently in the data set. For example, what would be the mode of the data set, 12, 11, 13, 9, 11, 8, 6, 11. Let us first arrange the data in the ascending order. That gives us, 6, 8, 9, 11, 11, 11, 12, 13. As you can see the value or the number 11, occurs most number of times than any other number in the data and hence 11 is the mode of the given data set.

To learn the steps involved in finding mode of a given set, let us consider an example. Let us assume that there is a basket ball match going on and the scores of the game are as listed below. Let us determine the mode of the scores.

Scores: 19, 6, 3, 22, 19, 9

Step1: list in the scores in the ascending order
3, 6, 9, 19, 19, 22
Step2: identify the number which is occurs most often, 19
  Hence,  19 is the mode of the score

So, the steps involved in finding mode are, first we need to order the list in ascending order and then identify the number or value which occurs most often that will give us mode.

Note: If there is no number which occurs most often, then we can say that the given data has no mode
On a cold winter day in December, the temperature of 7 cities in North America is recorded in Fahrenheit. How do we find the mode of these temperatures?  Temperatures recorded:  -9,-12, 0, -6,      - 10, -3, 5
To find the mean, the first step would be to order the given temperatures in ascending order and then identify the temperature which occurs most often
-12, -10, -9, -6,-3, 0, 5
From the above ordered list, we can see that there is no value or number which occurs most often. So, we can conclude that there is no mode for the given temperatures.

This article gives basic information about Online Statistics Tutoring. Next article will cover more Statistics concept and its problems and many more. Please share your comments.

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