American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) Practice Exam

When numbers or values are arranged according to size, the value of the middle term is called the?

1. Arithmetic average

2. Mode

3. Median

4. Mean

The correct answer is: Median

The value of the middle term in a set of numbers or values arranged in order of size is called the median. The median is found by sorting the values and identifying the number that falls directly in the middle of the list. If there is an odd number of values, the median is simply the middle one. If there is an even number of values, the median is calculated by averaging the two middle numbers. This concept is particularly useful in statistics as it provides a measure of central tendency that is less affected by extreme values (outliers) than the mean, or arithmetic average. In contrast, the arithmetic average is calculated by summing all values and dividing by the count of values, which can skew the result in cases of outliers. The mode, on the other hand, refers to the value that appears most frequently in a dataset, which is entirely different from what the median represents. The mean and the median can yield different insights depending on the data's distribution, highlighting the importance of understanding each measure's application in statistical analysis.