Video Transcript
An agriculturist wants to know the effect of hot weather on plants that grow in cold
environments. He places 300 plants in each temperature range and records how many of them die. What is the modal class temperature in which most plants cannot live?
We are given a table representing the different temperature ranges in the form of
groups or classes. So, for example, the first group represents temperatures of 25 or more up to
temperatures less than 30. The second row gives us the frequencies of values in each group because these are the
number of plants that died when put in environments with the respective
temperatures. Knowing that this row represents frequency means that we can determine the modal
class.
Recall that the modal class is the class or classes with the highest frequency. Looking at the table, we can observe that 288 is the highest frequency. But this is not the answer. Instead, we must give the actual class that this frequency belongs to, which means
that the modal class is 45 dash. So using this information, the agriculturist would be able to identify that most
plants cannot live at a temperature which is 45 degrees or more.
Note that we usually take an open-ended class at the end of a table like this to have
the same class width as the other classes. So the temperatures in this group 45 dash would go up to a value which is less than
50 degrees.
