Jacob owns a food truck. He wants to know how many sandwiches he should prepare each day, so he recorded the number of sandwiches he sold each day for a month.

Question

His data is represented in the box plot shown below.

Choose the best measures of center and spread based on the distribution.
A.
Center: median of 58 sandwiches
Spread: interquartile range of 24
B.
Center: mean of 65 sandwiches
Spread: standard deviation of 1.2
C.
Center: median of 65 sandwiches
Spread: interquartile range of 10
D.
Center: mean of 62 sandwiches
Spread: standard deviation of 1.5

Answer 1

A.
Center: median of 58 sandwiches
Spread: interquartile range of 24

The median is a better measure of center in this case because the data is skewed and the presence of outliers could affect the mean. The interquartile range is a better measure of spread because it is not affected by outliers like the standard deviation.