Maria is travelling back to New York to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday with her family.
To entertain herself on the plane Maria has ordered a maths puzzle book.
While waiting for her plane to depart Maria starts looking at some of the maths challenges.
She completes a few of the questions but then gets stuck on the following question:
The mean, median, and mode of the given set of numbers are all equal. What is the value of Y?
3, 2, Y, 3, 3
Help Maria answer the question.
Answer:
The mode = 3 (most common number)
The median = 3 (the middle number when the numbers are ordered from smallest to largest)
We can find an expression for the mean…
(3+2+Y+3+3)/5 = 3, since the mean, mode and median are all equal.
Now we can solve to find Y…
(Y+11)/5=3
(Y+11) = 15
Y = 4