Sainsbury bank

Half of all bank accounts will offer above average interest.

Bitstring , from the wonderful person dp said

Not necessarily. Check out mean, Median, and Mode. If one bank offered

In message , dp writes

No, at an extreme all bar one could offer above average interest.

"GSV Three Minds in a Can" wrote

Not if the average you are considering is either the mode or the median!

Bitstring , from the wonderful person Tim said

'Average' means 'mean' .. checkout any maths book. Mode and Median are separate things.

"GSV Three Minds in a Can" wrote

Nope - this is a common misconception. Strictly, all of mean/median/mode are *averages*. Usually, though, if someone just says "average" on its own, then they usually mean the "mean" (pun intended).

"GSV Three Minds in a Can" wrote

Why do you need a maths book - don't you have a maths degree, boyo?? ;-)

"GSV Three Minds in a Can" wrote

Agreed. But they are both averages, just like the mean is.

Bitstring , from the wonderful person Tim said

I repeat, in everyday parlance average means 'mean'. Even MS (Excel) have managed to work that out.

Agreed. It is one of those language issues where the context determines meaning. The average is usually the mean while an average could be mean, mode or median.

Certainly half of all items will be above the median. Most distributions will have around half items above the mean while for bank accounts I would expect the mode to be 0% so all accounts will pay interest above or equal to this average. I'm starting to feel happy about my account :)

Average means arithmetic mean in most cases, but the complication is that with a discrete distribution with a finite range (rather than a continuous one with infinite range) it likely that a high proportion will be exactly on the arithmetic mean.

Thom