ABSTRACT
Scientists working in various disciplines such as agriculture, horticulture, medicine, economics, industry, sociology, and other fields conduct various types of experiments or surveys and collect data following scientific princi ples and procedures to get reliable and valid information about the variables of their study. The data thus collected may relate to any character or variable such as income of individuals, number of members in a family, crop yield/ha, exchange rates, soil fertility levels, blood pressure, height, weight, age, weight of child at birth, number of students admitted in different years in a university. The observed variables exhibit variation or variability among themselves. Each set of observations generates a distribution, and we have to study the nature of such distributions in order to arrive at inferences. Often, observations cluster or concentrate around a particular value or a representa tive value or in the middle of the range. Values tend to approach a represen tative value. Such a phenomenon is called study of central tendency. Central tendency gives us the description of the average.
