Here, once again, is the stem plot of travel times to work for $20$randomly selected New Yorkers. Earlier, we found that the median was $22.5$minutes.

Based only on the stem plot, would you expect the mean travel time to be less than, about the same as, or larger than the median? Why?

Median on the basis of provided information: $22.5$

The number of observations : $20$

The data is divided into stems (the highest digit) and leaves (the lowest digit) in a stem and leaf plot (the smallest digits). Before the personal computer, they were popular because they were a quick way to sketch data distributions by hand.

The graph is supposed to be on the right side, therefore it is skewed towards the right-hand side, so the mean of the data should be bigger than the value of the median, according to the given distribution data. The mean and median of a nearly symmetric distribution are very close together. When the distribution is perfectly symmetric, the mean and median are identical. The mean, however, is often farther out in the long tail than the median in this situation of skewed distribution.