MacRaven - Dave Haxton's Weblog

Wed, 26 Oct 2005

OK, I took it:

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct!

And the one I missed is still a puzzler. The quiz doesn't give you the right answers, or tell you which one you missed, so I went back and retook it until I found it. If you take it, the one I missed was the sequence 2,2,3,4,5 question .. I'd be interested to know how the correct answer was obtained (a coin flip doesn't count, nor does "well, it had to be, because the others were obviously incorrect...").

It's such a common nightmare that it's become a cliche: Taking an exam that you forgot to study for. Now you can experience it...

(link) [CNET News.com]

/Home | 2 writebacks | permanent link

On 10/26/2005 22:12:24
Asahel wrote

The answer is that 2 is the "mode." The mode is the most common number in a series, as opposed to the mean (average) and median (number in the unweighted middle). I can't believe I remembered that. :)

On 10/26/2005 22:35:47
Dave H wrote

Indeed ...

that was the answer - I knew it couldn't be the median or the average, which left me with two choices, and while I couldn't see it being standard deviation, I'd never heard of "mode" - so the former won the coin toss. In hindsight, it occurred to me that standard deviation was probably a bit advanced for 8th grade, but still - never heard of 'mode' as the most common number in a series. Interestingly enough, my initial Googling to find more info on this 'mode' turned up naught - after reading your comment and adding 'most common number' to Google's search box I was able to find tons of stuff from statistics pages on it. So, thanks for clearing that up! I learned something new from an Internet quiz - first time for everything, I suppose. Be well, Dave H.

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