part, studying more gets you results. (Not that we are trying to imply anything.
It’s just an example, we swear.)
STATISTICS
In typical Testing Serpent fashion, the SAT likes to use the horrible word
statistics to cover some much-less-horrible math concepts. For example, the
most common statistics problems are . . .
MEAN, MEDIAN, AND MODE
The arithmetic mean is the most commonly used average, and if you are asked to
simply find the average, you should find the mean.
Arithmetic mean = (a + b + c + d)/n where a, b, c, d are the numbers and n is
the number of numbers being averaged. For example, the mean of 3, 5, 6, 7 is
(3 + 5 + 6 + 7) / 4 = 5.25Notice that the denominator is 4 because there are four numbers in the group.
Sometimes figuring out what n is can be tricky.
Manek got 75% of the questions correct on his first test, and 65% correct on
his second. What does he need to score on his third test to have an average of
80% for the three tests?
To find the answer, let’s say that the third test score is n.