Home > CCA > Chapter 11 > Lesson 11.1.2 > Problem11-25

11-25.

The Toronto Hawks football team is having a meeting with fans to discuss salaries. The team president says, “we can’t afford to be any more generous because our average salary is almost $2,000,000 a year.” A fan replies, “Nonsense. Your average player only makes$850,000 a year—you can easily afford a raise.” If they are using the same set of data, how can their averages be different? How could such a large difference have occurred? Homework Help ✎

Here's a sample data set: 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 11, 13, 15
What's the mean? The median? Are they close together?

Mean: 9
Median: 10

Here's another sample data set:
12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 600, 750
What's the mean? The median? Are they close together?

Mean: 163
Median: 18

What do you think causes the mean to be so far from the median in the second data set?
Are there numbers that are increasing the mean but not the median?
How does that apply to the situation above?

Data sets with numbers that are far larger or smaller than the other numbers in the set tend to have means and medians that are far apart.
In the case of the football team, super star players earn a lot more than the average players.
The manager used the mean, while the fan used the median.