Brian and several of his work colleagues are on a kickball team together. The dot plot above shows the number of points his team scored during each of 14 games played so far this season. The league's record for highest average points scored per game during a season is 7.5. To break this record, a team's season average must be at least half a point higher. If Brian and his teammates are to set a new season record, how many points must they average during their final two games?

Options

A. `9`
B. `12`
C. `14`
D. `15`

Answer

B

Explanation

Difficult: Medium
Category: Problem Solving and Data Analysis/ Statistics and Probability.
Strategic Advice: Knowing when the mean and median of a data set are equal is the key to answering a question like this.
Getting to the Answers: The mean of a data set is approximately equal to the median when the data has a symmetrical distribution. In this scenario, the mean and median are not equal, which indicates that the data distribution is asymmetric. The difference between them is fairly large (compared to the values themselves). which could be explained by the presence of outliers (values that are significantly smaller or larger than the other values in the data). Outliers affect the mean of a data set but not the median. Because the mean is lower than the median, the outliers must also be on the low side, which means you can reasonably conclude conclude that a few areas in the study had gas prices that were much than those elsewhere in ths state. Chice (A) is correct.