Why do you have three averages?

Answer 1

We have the Average, which is correctly known as the Mean. This is when you add all numbers and divide by the amount of numbers. That works fine when you have a lot of numbers that are of similar values.

However, if you have a number in a set that is much larger than any of the others, it will give an unrealistic value for an average. So for example, if you had 10 numbers and 9 of them were under 25, and one was over 1000, the Mean of that set would not give a realistic value to reflect what you are looking for.

So we have two other methods. One is the Median. This is where you put all the numbers in order of value, and then find the middle value if there is an odd number of values, or if there is an even amount, the value halfway between the two middle numbers. A third method is to get the Mode. This is the number that occurs most often in a set of values.