http://www.ck12.org Chapter 5. Measures of Central Tendency
Example B
The weekly wages of 7 randomly selected employees of Wendy’s were $98.00, $125.00, $75.00, $120.00, $86.00,
$92.00, and $110.00, respectively. What is the mode of these wages?
Each value in the above data set occurs only once. Therefore, this data has no mode.
Example C
6 students attending a local swimming competition were asked what color bathing suit they were wearing. The
responses were red, blue, black, pink, green, and blue.
What is the mode of these responses?
Remember that the mode can be determined for qualitative data as well as quantitative data, but the mean and the
median can only be determined for quantitative data. The color blue was the only response that occurred more than
once and is, therefore, the mode of this data set.
Mode = blue
Points to Consider
- Is reference made to the mode in any other branch of statistics?
- Can the mode be useful when presenting graphical representations of data?
Guided Practice
a. The ages of 12 randomly selected customers at a local coffee shop are listed below:
23 , 21 , 29 , 24 , 31 , 21 , 27 , 23 , 24 , 32 , 33 , 19
What is the mode of the above ages?
b. The following table represents the number of times that 100 randomly selected students ate at the school cafeteria
during the first month of school:
Number of Times Eating in the Cafeteria 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Number of Students 3 8 22 29 20 8 10What is the mode of the numbers of times that a student ate at the cafeteria?
Answer:
a. The above data set has 3 values that each occur with a frequency of 2. These values are 21, 23, and 24. All other
values occur only once. Therefore, this set of data has 3 modes.
Modes = 21, 23, and 24
b. When data is arranged in a frequency table, the mode is simply the value that has the highest frequency. Therefore,
since the table shows that 29 students ate 5 times in the cafeteria, 5 is the mode of the data set.
Mode = 5 times