Finding the Mean, Median and Mode From a Frequency Table
 

Worked example

Find the mean, median and mode from this frequency table:

Number of apples in bag (x)	Frequency (f)	f × x
4	5	20
5	8	40
6	12	72
7	4	28
8	1	8
	Sf = 30	Sfx = 168

Note:

• S is a symbol which means 'the sum of'. It is the Greek letter, sigma.
• So Sf means ' the sum of the frequencies'.
• And Sfx means 'the sum of the frequencies x the values'.

	Mean   =  Sfx  =  168  =  5.7 Sf 30
	The median is found by considering the middle of the distribution, There are 30 entries, so the median is the 15th/16th value. We can find this by looking at the frequency column. If we add on the frequencies, we can see that the median value occurs in the '6 apple' row. So the median = 6
	The mode is very easy to find. It is the most common value, so... The mode = 6 (it has the highest frequency)