Real-Life Math
You are a quality assurance engineer for a large hospital. To do their jobs properly, employees must often walk from one section of the building to other sections. There are elevators, an underground passageway and long corridors to be navigated. You are trying to find out how much time it takes an employee to deliver meals from the kitchen to the geriatric ward.
You explain to the kitchen staff that for the next week, you want them to record how much time it takes them to deliver the meals. Immediately, some of the staff become anxious. They are afraid that if you find out the time it takes them, they will be disciplined if they do not make the trip in that exact amount of time.
You explain that this is not going to happen. You explain that there will always be variations in the amount of time. You want to find out the average times, and you want to know the amount of the variations that fall within the normal range.
You decide to create a run chart. To do this, you instruct the 5 employees to record their times for a week. After they have given you their times, you enter the information in a chart. This information is called raw data.
The raw data looks like this:
| Mon. | Tues. | Wed. | Thurs. | Fri. |
| Employee 1 | 7 min | 7.5 min | 6.8 min | 6.5 min | 7.2 min |
| Employee 2 | 7.5 | 7.4 | 6.4 | 6.9 | 7.1 |
| Employee 3 | 6.6 | 7.2 | 7.2 | 7.6 | 6.7 |
| Employee 4 | 6.9 | 6.9 | 7 | 6.9 | 7.3 |
| Employee 5 | 7 | 7.4 | 6.8 | 6.7 | 7 |
Questions:
- What is the average time taken on each of the five days?
- What is the weekly average?
- How could you make use of this information?