Question

joe is interested in the prices of homes sold in his area. he found a list of the selling prices of 50 homes for the past month. most of the homes sold for $100,000 - $350,000, but there were a few that sold for more than $1,000,000. which of the following statements is true about the mean and median selling price for the 50 homes? the mean and median are equal. the mean is less than the median. the mean is greater than the median. the actual selling prices are needed to determine this.

Explanation:

Step1: Understand the effect of outliers on mean and median

The median is the middle - value when the data is ordered. It is not affected much by extreme values (outliers). The mean is the sum of all values divided by the number of values. Extreme high - value outliers (like homes sold for more than $1,000,000$) will pull the mean upwards.

Step2: Analyze the relationship between mean and median for the given data

Since most of the homes are in the $100000 - 350000$ range (relatively lower values) and there are a few high - value outliers. When we calculate the mean, the high - value outliers increase the sum of all selling prices. But the median, which is the average of the 25th and 26th ordered values (for \(n = 50\) data points), is not affected by these high - value outliers.

Answer:

The mean is greater than the median.