ShmoopTube

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Okay, here's the boring, unshmoopily-voiced question...

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The yearly salaries of eight employees at a company are shown below...

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in thousands of dollars...

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What is the mean yearly salary?

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And here are the answers...

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OK, so we have 8 people making a range of salaries and

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the question is asking us for the mean.

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We are basically being tested on whether or

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not we know the definition of the term.

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Mean simply means average.

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So it has nothing to do with the employees not being given Christmas off.

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To get the average, we add up the numbers we are given and then divide our answer by

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the total number of items, or elements.

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So in this case, we would add...

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25, 28, 32, 35, 44, 57, 84, and 103...

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we'll leave off the thousands for now to make the math simpler...

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...and we get a total of 408.

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However, the problem is asking us for the mean, not the sum.

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So we still need to divide by the total number of elements.

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To get the average or mean we divide 408 by 8... and get 51.

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But 51... what? Dollars?

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We have a feeling the employees wouldn't be happy making less than 15 cents a day.

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That wouldn't even cover their morning latte.

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Remember that we have to convert our number back into thousands...

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...so 51 thousand dollars is the average salary for our 8 employees.

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The answer is D.

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