In weather news, the maximum and minimum temperature figures shows:

Question

Accepted Answer

The correct option is 1:

In statistics, the figures for the maximum and minimum temperature provided in weather reports are used to calculate the measure of dispersion known as the **Range**. The range is the simplest measure of variability in a dataset, calculated by taking the difference between the largest value (the maximum temperature) and the smallest value (the minimum temperature). This calculation immediately tells us the spread or the extent of variation in the temperature for that day. For instance, if the maximum temperature is 35°C and the minimum is 20°C, the range is 15°C, indicating how much the temperature fluctuates. Since weather news explicitly gives these two extreme values, it directly provides the necessary components to determine the range.

The incorrect option is 2 (Quartile Deviation): Quartile Deviation measures the spread of the middle 50% of the data and requires identifying the first (Q1) and third (Q3) quartiles of a full dataset, not just the two extreme values. The incorrect option is 3 (Mean Deviation): Mean Deviation calculates the average absolute difference between each observation and the mean or median of the entire dataset, a calculation impossible to perform with only the maximum and minimum values. The incorrect option is 4 (S. D. or Standard Deviation): Standard Deviation is the square root of the variance and is the most common measure of dispersion; however, it also requires calculating the average squared deviations from the mean for a full set of observations, which cannot be done with only the highest and lowest figures.