Calculating Averages

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Steve Jones, and I'm going to explain how to calculate averages. This is a very simple process, and a very important one. And initially, I'm going to look at five numbers. Here they are, two, three, four, five, and six. If you total up they are twenty all together, okay? You can say this could be, for example, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and we are a car salesman, so these are the number of cars that we sold during the week. Obviously, we seem to be getting better towards Friday, with more experience. So, how many cars would you say you have sold during the week? Well, the answer is twenty. But what was the average number, the average daily sales? So, average sales daily, well, it's quite simple. What you are saying is not how many did you sell on any particular day, but how many would you expect to sell on a particular day over a period of months, so that you could then estimate over a set of months exactly how many cars you're going to sell. Let's say every week was like this. So, the average sales daily is simply the total number divided by the number of days, or in this case the number of numbers. It doesn't matter. This is an example with cars or whatever. It doesn't matter what you're doing. How many numbers have you got? Well, we've got five numbers, haven't we? Two, three, four, five, and six, that's two, three, four, five, six, five numbers. So, the average sales daily is the total number, twenty, divided by the number of days, five, and of course, very simply, this gives us four. So, if I had sold four cars on each day I would, in fact, have reached the same total of twenty. So, this is simply how to calculate the average."