What is 0.725 rounded to two decimal placeS?

Answer 1

You can round 5 up or down so the answer could be 0.72 (rounded down) or 0.73 (rounded up).

However, there is a convention introduced by statisticians, that you should always round 5 up or down so that the previous digit becomes even. That means the answer should be 0.72.

Read on if you want the reason for this convention:

You always round [1,2,3,4] down and [6,7,8,9] up; nicely balanced. If you always rounded 5 up you would be introducing an upward bias. Conversely, always rounding 5 down would introduce a downward bias. So what you need is a mechanism that requires you to round 5 upwards half the time and downwards half the time. The most convenient way of ensuring that was this odd and even rule. So 0.725 = 0.72, 0.735 = 0.74 and 0.745 = 0.74