Practice question · Multiple choice
House prices, hospital stays and reaction times are all right-skewed. What do these variables have in common that produces the long right tail?
Hints
- Ask what the smallest possible value is for each, and what the largest is.
- A bounded side and an unbounded side. Which way does the tail go?
Show the answer
B. A hard floor at zero and no ceiling, so values pile up at the bottom.
Why
The bounded side compresses the values and the unbounded side lets them stretch: nobody responds in 50 milliseconds and an inattentive trial runs to several seconds. Keep it distinct from the opposite shape, many small additive influences produce a normal distribution, and skew arises when influences are multiplicative or a boundary is doing the work.
Practise Data Distributions and Skewness
The app has 6 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Psychology I is free to start.
More questions on Data Distributions and Skewness
- In a right-skewed income distribution the mean sits above the median.
- Sort each real-world variable by its likely skew.
- A dataset contains one value far from the rest. What is wrong with the common advice to "remove the outlier…
- A charity reports that the mean donation to its campaign was £340. A journalist checks and finds the median…