againall do is take the datasort it numericallyand take the center point if you have an even number of data pointsthen the median might actually fall in between two data points it wouldn' be clear which one is actually the middle in that caseall you do istake the average of the two that do fall in the middle and consider that number as the median the factor of outliers now in the preceding example of the number of kids in each householdthe median and the mean were pretty close to each other because there weren' lot of outliers we had or kidsbut we didn' have some wacky family that had kids that would have really skewed the meanbut it might not have changed the median too much that' why the median is often very useful thing to look at and often overlooked median is less susceptible to outliers than the mean people have tendency to mislead people with statistics sometimes ' going to keep pointing this out throughout the book wherever can for exampleyou can talk about the mean or average household income in the united statesand that actual number from last year when looked it up was $ , or sobut that doesn' really provide an accurate picture of what the typical american makes that is becauseif you look at the median incomeit' much lower at $ , why is thatwellbecause of income inequality there are few very rich people in americaand the same is true in lot of countries as well america' not even the worstbut you know those billionairesthose super-rich people that live on wall street or silicon valley or some other super-rich placethey skew the mean but there' so few of them that they don' really affect the median so much this is great example of where the median tells much better story about the typical person or data point in this example than the mean does whenever someone talks about the meanyou have to think about what does the data distribution looks like are there outliers that might be skewing that meanand if the answer is potentially yesyou should also ask for the medianbecause oftenthat provides more insight than the mean or the average