Below average, average, and above average – miles driven per year

averagestatistics

Assume a vehicle is driven, on average, 12,000 miles per year. What would be considered:

  • Way below average?
  • Below average?
  • Above average?
  • Way above average?

Is there some sort of formula that could be applied to determine this? For example, can we give "average" a tolerance of +-10%? Anything outside of that +-10% would be below or above average?

Or would this be represented in a standard bell curve? So average would be +- ~34%?

Best Answer

Below and above are just less and more than $12,000$ miles/year. Way below and way above are not mathematical terms. I would suggest the bottom and top $10\%$ of the population, but one could argue for other numbers. In any case, you need to know something about the distribution besides the mean to be able to answer. If $90\%$ of the people drive between $11,900$ and $12,100$ you could consider way below to be anything less than $11,900$

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