A Student Arrived on Campus in September to Find That

Essay

A student arrived on campus in September to find that dorm charges had gone up. Observing that there had been no capital improvements in his room or in the dorm, and knowing that mortgage rates could not be involved (the dorm had been paid off for 35 years), he inquired politely at the business office about the reasons for the increase. "Utilities went up,"was the answer. Having an activist upbringing, he planned an energy conservation campaign designed to turn out unused lights. In order to have convincing data for the college business office, he first measured the number of lights that were on but not being used in each of the six dorms on campus. These pre-campaign observations were made every night at 10 P.M. for a week and are shown below.
a. Arrange them into an appropriate frequency distribution.
b. Draw a graph of the distribution.
c. Find the mean of the distribution.
d. Find the median of the distribution.
e. Describe the direction of the skew, if any.
f. Are answers c and d parameters or statistics? Justify your answer. $$\begin{array} { r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r } 9 & 19 & 12 & 24 & 10 & 7 & 6 & 27 & 15 & 15 & 13 & 21 & 12 & 11 & 9 \\10 & 20 & 8 & 14 & 16 & 14 & 10 & 9 & 35 & 7 & 4 & 8 & 8 & 13 & 19 \\11 & 11 & 17 & 25 & 9 & 6 & 16 & 12 & 13 & 14 & 16 & 28 & & &\end{array}$$