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Descriptive statistics practice questions — IB Maths AA
12 free multiple-choice problems on descriptive statistics, ordered to match IB Maths AA difficulty, each with a full worked solution. No account needed — and there's a fresh problem set every day.
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Problems & worked solutions
Problem 1 — Descriptive statistics
The variance of (population formula, divide by ) is:
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Mean .
Squared deviations: .
Variance .
Problem 2 — Descriptive statistics
Every value in the list is decreased by , and each result is then halved. The population standard deviation of the new list is:
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Original mean: .
Deviations give
The new list is , with mean . Its deviations are , so
Subtracting moved the mean by as well, so every deviation was unchanged; halving each value halved every deviation, so the standard deviation is halved:
Problem 3 — Descriptive statistics
A set of numbers has mean . When one of the numbers is removed, the remaining numbers have mean . The number that was removed is:
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The eight original numbers add up to:
The seven numbers that remain add up to:
The two totals contain exactly the same numbers except for the one that was deleted, so that number is the gap between them:
As a check, lies below the original mean of , so deleting it pulls the mean of what is left upwards — consistent with the new mean of .
Problem 4 — Descriptive statistics
A survey of households records the number of pets in each household:
The population variance of the number of pets per household is:
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Total frequency: .
Weighted total: , so
Weighted squared deviations, using :
Dividing by the total frequency :
Problem 5 — Descriptive statistics
For the values , the variance is equal to:
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Mean: .
All deviations are zero: for every , so
Problem 6 — Descriptive statistics
The standard deviation of a statistical series is equal to:
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By definition, the standard deviation is the square root of the variance :
The mean and the sum divided by denote the arithmetic mean, not the standard deviation.
Problem 7 — Descriptive statistics
The variance of the values is:
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Mean: .
Squared deviations:
So .
Problem 8 — Descriptive statistics
The mean of the data set is:
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Sum .
Mean .
Problem 9 — Descriptive statistics
A shop recorded the number of bicycles it sold on each of six days: , , , , , . The median number of bicycles sold per day is:
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Written in increasing order, the six daily totals are:
With there is no single central day: the two central positions are the rd and the th, holding and .
The median is the mean of that pair:
Problem 10 — Descriptive statistics
The arithmetic mean of the values is:
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With values:
2 more Descriptive statistics questions in the app
Also covered in Descriptive statistics practice across every exam.
