Let’s try another couple of sets of questions like that to observe what’s happening.

Hopefully you obtained [latex]2[/latex] and [latex]-2[/latex] for your answers to Question 4. Have you caught on to what’s happening in these question pairs yet?  Let’s try one more pair. In Question 5, you’ll identify values one and a half standard deviations above and below the mean. Can you predict what the answers to Question 6 should be?

In Questions 2, 4, and 6, you calculated values that were a given number of standard deviations above and below the mean. You discovered when you divided the difference between the value and the mean by the standard deviation, that the result was a positive number of standard deviations (for values above the mean) or a negative number of standard deviations (for values below the mean). That is, a resulting negative can be thought of as indicating a value that lies to the left of the mean, and the positive indicates a value that lies to the right of the mean.