How is median used? - Answers

A median is a form of average. What we usually think of as an average is more correctly know as the mean. It is the total of the numbers divided by the amount of numbers. The median is the middle number in a set of numbers, when they are listed in numerical order. If you had a list of numbers and one of these was much higher than all the rest, then the mean might not really represent a true reflection of the average as we think of it. Say your numbers were 11, 15, 30, 1200, 4, 19 and 10. Getting the average of those is going to give 184.1429 which isn't really a good representation. The 1200 is causing that value to be considerably higher than most of the numbers. In this case using the median is better. Listing the numbers in order and finding the middle one gives us 15. The median will therefore be 15, which looks more realistic. See the related questions below for more information.