Interpreting a frequency table

Intro

Howdy! I'm Professor Curtis of Aspire Mountain Academy here with more statistics homework help. Today we're going to learn how to interpret a frequency table. Here's our problem statement: Refer to the table summarizing service times (seconds) of dinners at a fast food restaurant. How many individuals are included in the summary? Is it possible to identify the exact values of all the original service times?

Part 1

Okay, so the first part of his problem is asking us for the total number of individuals included in the summary.  We have our frequency table here, so to get the total number, we just add up the number that are in each of the different categories or classes.  So to do that, I'm going to whip out my calculator and just add in the frequency counts for each of the categories together and give me the total that's in the summary.  I put my answer here in the answer field.  Excellent!

Part 2

And now the second part of the problem asks, "Is it possible to identify the exact values of all the original surface times?"  Well, the only information we have is the frequency counts that are in each category or class.  So for this first category where we've got 60 to 119 seconds, we have a frequency count of 7.  That tells us seven of the times in the total dataset are somewhere between 60 and 119.  We don't know exactly where they are.  We don't exactly what they are.  All that we know is that there are seven of them within this range.  So all seven of those data points could be 60.  They could all be 65.  They could all be 70.  They could all be a hundred. Or hey, maybe there's three of them that are 70 and four of them are 100.  That's another possibility.

I mean, if you start thinking about it, you see there are endless numbers of possibilities for where these seven data points could lie within this range.  So without knowing more information about the specific data point, we'd have no idea where those seven points are.  So no, the frequency distribution doesn't tell us the exact value; it could be any value within those class limits. And that's going to be this answer here.  Nice work!

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