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05 May 2025, 12:54
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Hi everyone,
I recently encountered a practice question on the TTP platform involving the calculation of the median from a histogram showing the ages of women attending an event.
In the solution, they calculate the total number of women (47), find the position of the median using the formula (n+1)/2=24(n+1)/2=24, and then simply add up the frequencies from left to right to locate the 24th value — which falls in the 50–59 age group.
What confuses me is this:
Why don't we sort the age frequencies before identifying the 24th value?
I thought that to find the median, we were supposed to sort the data values (or in this case, age ranges by frequency) and then identify the middle one. But the explanation skips that and directly accumulates from the lowest age group upward.
Is that normal when working with histograms or frequency tables? Could someone explain why we don’t need to sort the frequencies here?
I recently encountered a practice question on the TTP platform involving the calculation of the median from a histogram showing the ages of women attending an event.
In the solution, they calculate the total number of women (47), find the position of the median using the formula (n+1)/2=24(n+1)/2=24, and then simply add up the frequencies from left to right to locate the 24th value — which falls in the 50–59 age group.
What confuses me is this:
Why don't we sort the age frequencies before identifying the 24th value?
I thought that to find the median, we were supposed to sort the data values (or in this case, age ranges by frequency) and then identify the middle one. But the explanation skips that and directly accumulates from the lowest age group upward.
Is that normal when working with histograms or frequency tables? Could someone explain why we don’t need to sort the frequencies here?
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05 May 2025, 13:18
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05 May 2025, 13:30
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Matteo13120 Lets say in the first interval of the histogram there are 5 values, and there are 51 values in total, we know that the five values in the 1st interval can't be the median because even though we dont know the exact ordering, any ordering among them wont make any of them come out of the interval.
Do you get the point ? If not I'll try to explain better.
Do you get the point ? If not I'll try to explain better.
