Intentional AP hilarity?

From a story about why people don't read books:

"Among those who said they had read books, the median figure -- <b>with half reading more, half fewer</b> -- was nine books for women and five for men."

I guess I find it funny that they felt it necessary to explain what 'median' means.

 

Actually, I can understand why they might explain it. I'm pretty adept at math and I still get confused at times among median, mean and mode. I'm guessing there's lots of folks out there who wouldn't know what the median actually was.

 

Pretty standard practice, actually.

 

Yet I don't think I've ever seen 'average' defined.

 

I guess we have to draw a line somewhere between terms that we assume our readers understand (average, basketball) and terms that may require explanation (median, ultimate hopscotch).

 

This is funny because I do not think anyone here understands what a median is.

Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Just kidding. Most people do not know the difference between these three.

If I have a set of numbers (1,1,2,3,4,4,5,5,6,9,9,9,9,9) here is the mode, median and the mean for the set.

The mode is the value that occurs the most often in the set. This time, it is 9 which occurs five times.

The mean is the average of the numbers. This can be attained by adding all the values together (76) and dividing all of the values by the number of values (14) you added together (76/14=5.42).

The median can be thought of more as a midpoint. First arrange the numbers from lowest to greatest in value. You eliminate the lowest and highest value from the set and continue until you find the middle value. If this cannot be done evenly and you have two numbers remaining in the middle, you find the mean of the two remaining numbers. The median of this set is 5.