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The formal definition for the mode of a dataset is:

The most frequently occurring observation in the dataset. A dataset can have multiple modes if there is more than one value with the same maximum frequency.

While you may be able to find the mode of a small dataset by simply looking through it, if you have trouble, we recommend you follow these two steps:

  1. Find the frequency of every unique number in the dataset
  2. Determine which number has the highest frequency

Example

Say we have a dataset with the following ten numbers:

24, 16, 12, 10, 12, 28, 38, 12, 28, 2424,\ 16,\ 12,\ 10,\ 12,\ 28,\ 38,\ 12,\ 28,\ 24

Let’s find the frequency of each number:

24 16 12 10 28 38
2 1 3 1 2 1

From the table, we can see that our mode is 12, the most frequent number in our dataset.

Instructions

1.

Determine the mode of the ages for the first ten authors in the Le Monde survey:

29,49,42,43,32,38,37,41,27,2729, 49, 42, 43, 32, 38, 37, 41, 27, 27

Save the value to mode_age.

2.

Determine the number of authors who were the age of the mode. Save the number to mode_count.

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