Real-Life Math -- Solution
In your consumer test of your company's new chocolate, Peanut Butter
Raspberry Truffles, the majority of your consumers rated the chocolate as
excellent or good. Your feeling is that the chocolate will be passed on to
the next battery of tests, but you want to be sure. So, you need to figure
the average consumer rating.
Your consumers rated the chocolate as
follows:
9 consumers rate it as excellent
10 consumers
rate it as good
2 consumers rate it as fair
2 consumer
rates it as poor
2 consumers rate it as awful
Excellent = 10,
good = 8, fair = 6, poor = 4, and awful = 2
To find
the average consumer rating, you need to multiply the value of each rating
with the number of people who used that rating. For example, 10 of your consumers
rated the chocolate as good. So you need to multiply 10 (number of consumers)
x 8 (the rating for good).
9 x 10 (excellent) = 90
10
x 8 (good) = 80
2 x 6 (fair) = 12
2 x 4 (poor) = 8
2 x 2 (awful)
= 4
Add all the ratings values together and divide by
the number of total consumers who participated in the test, in this case 25.
The answer that you get will be your average consumer rating.
90
+ 80 + 12 + 8 + 4 = 194
194 / 25 = 7.76
Your average
consumer rating is 7.76, not quite enough to pass the product on to the next
step.
Mathematical skills are a very important part of the job of a
sensory analyst. "The sensory analyst must be competent in math and have a
basic understanding of statistics," says sensory analyst Karen Erin. "Math
and statistical analysis are used to report and analyze all sensory data."