Center With MEDIAN and MODE

When you summarize data, the average is not the only "middle." Two other measures of center matter: the median and the mode.

• MEDIAN is the middle value when numbers are sorted.
• MODE is the value that appears most often.

Each tells a different story about your dataset, and together they paint a clearer picture than the average alone.

The average is easily pulled around by extreme values. If most salaries are near 50,000 but one person earns 5,000,000, the average jumps far above what a typical person earns.

The median ignores this. It simply asks: what value sits exactly in the middle? That makes it a robust measure of "typical" for skewed data like income, house prices, or response times.