In this activity, we will use the Best Actor Oscar winners (1970-2001) to:

• Learn how to use a statistics package to produce the numerical measures, or “descriptive statistics” of a distribution.
• Get some information about the distribution from its five-number summary.

Click here to see the entire dataset.

Choose your statistical package and follow the instructions to compute numerical measures. Note that “n” represents the sample size, which is the number of individuals in the data set.

Instructions

Click on the link corresponding to your statistical package to see instructions for completing the activity, and then answer the questions below.

R | StatCrunch | Minitab | Excel 2007 | TI Calculator

Question 1:

Getting information from the output:

a. How many observations are in this data set?

b. What is the mean age of the actors who won the Oscar?

c. What is the five-number summary of the distribution?

Question 2:

Get information from the five-number summary:

a. Half of the actors won the Oscar before what age?

b. What is the range covered by all the actors’ ages?

c. What is the range covered by the middle 50% of the ages?