Help with statistics help. I don't understand?

[garwyli91]

A study of the size of jury awards in civil cases (such as injury, product liabilty, and medical malpractice) in Chicago showed that the median award was about $8000. But the mean award was about $69,000. Explain how this great difference between the two measures of center can occur.

[gobrwy]

what is the mean: mathemathical average.
what median is the middle awards when ranked by size.
so 1, 5,10,20, 10,000 has a median of 10 but a mean over 2000.

Hopefully now you can find suitable figures for your question

[pannoowau]

There is an outlier that affects the mean but not the median.


For example:

5000, 7000, 8000, 10000, 90000

If that was the data, the median would be 8000 but the mean would be a much larger misleading number.

[forde]

most cases are lost

[werner72]

It means that 1 very BIIIIG reward was given.
Let's say that there are 3 jurors:
juror A gets 8000
juror B gets 8000
juror C gets 191000
Then we get the situation you desribe.
Ofcourse, if there are more jurors, then the BIIIIG reward even gets bigger...

[merla15]

say there were 5 amounts
1k,2k,8k,100k,234k
median is 8k, mean is 69k
the median should be low and the amounts higher than the median must be a lot higher.

[artzai]

The median is just the number in the middle of the set. Whereas he mean is the average of all the numbers added then divided by how many numbers there are. Therefore, there might be a lot of lower numbers, then a few really high numbers, so the median would be a lot lower than the average. e.g. (1,2,3,4,100)
Median:3
Mean:22

[arber47]

There is different amounts of money per state. I think that there is some people receiving more due to the severity of the case. So the cash that someone can get is pretty high but it is more rare and the median reward is the average between the usual higher price and low price. I am not sure but this is just a guess. I hope you can figure it out though.