Normal Distributions

Today we started out with mental math, and Mr. Max told us that tomorrow will be our last mental math quiz this year. Today couldn't be the last one because Mr. Max couldn't face ending with the number 34, the number has to end in a 5 or a 0. I'm not going to comment on that.....

Mr. Max checked homework from Thursday and he was quite surprised that our sub loved us. Mr. Max, we can't help that we're amazing.

The focus today was on normal distributions, and although we didn't really do any math, Mr. Max assured us that all the rules we have been learning will help us out when we finally get to do some problems.





Mr. Max tried to trick us by asking if we knew what a frequency polygon was. I really didn't know what he was talking about, so he then asked if we knew what a frequency histogram was, since they are the same thing. While in all reality he could have just said it was a simple bar graph, because then everybody would understand. Tricky, tricky.

Mr. Max referenced the site we were to work on yesterday. He showed us many of the different gadgets on the site that had something to do with normal distributions.

We took some notes and Mr. Max taught us about the bell curve and some distribution characteristics. He also made the lovely diagram above, which turned out quite nicely I might add, to show us the meanings of the characteristics. He showed us the 68-95-99.7 rule. Which didn't really make sense when you added up the numbers in the graph, but Mr. Max assured us "he just knew" and then showed us in the calculator.

For homework we were assigned to try #7 in the review package. Thats right, all you have to do is try and give it your best shot.


P.S. Skew- in statistics skew is the asymmetry of a distribution around its mean. Skew can be positive or negative. So in english this means the unbalanced distribution of the numbers around the average number.