An average is a single value that is meant to typify a list of values. If all the numbers in the list are the same, then this number should be used. If the numbers are not the same, an easy way to get a representative value from a list is to randomly pick any number from the list.

There are many different descriptive statistics that can be chosen as a measurement of the central tendency of the data items. These include mean, the median and the mode. Other statistical measures such as the standard deviation and the range are called measures of spread and describe how spread out the data is.

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MEDIAN: The number separating the higher half of a sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half.

The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one. If there is an even number of observations, the median is not unique, so one often takes the mean of the two middle values.

MODE: The value that occurs the most frequently in a data set or a probability distribution.