The Mode
That's right!
The mode is 2.
One way to make sure you don't miss any values in a data set is to put the values in numerical order. (This is also a necessary step if you are asked to find the median.)
Putting this data set in order, you get {1, 2, 2, 2, 4, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 10, 34}.
Now consider this data set.
{4, 9, 6, 6, 4, 1, 3, 7, 2}
What do you suppose is the mode of this set?
Consider the following data set.
{2, 2, 4, 6, 7, 34, 2, 6, 7, 8, 8, 1 ,10}
What is the mode?
Exactly!
To summarize:
[[summary]]
Not quite.
Incorrect.
Actually, 6 appears only twice in the set.
Incorrect.
Actually, 8 appears only twice in the set.
Incorrect.
Actually, 7 appears only twice in the set.
Note that 2 appears three times in the set, and no other number appears more than twice.
The **mode** is one of the three measures of central tendency, along with the mean and median. The mode of a data set is the value that appears the most often in the set.
A set of values can have more than one mode. Whichever values occur most often in the data set are all modes. So for this set, both 4 and 6 are modes.
As long as you remember the definition of mode (Think "mode = most"!), any question about modes on the GRE should be pretty easy.
The mode is 4 because it is the smaller of the two numbers that occur most often.
The mode is 5 because it is the average of the two numbers that occur most often.
The mode is 6 because it is the larger of the two numbers that occur most often.
Both 4 and 6 are modes because both appear most often.
2
6
7
8
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