Question

In your own words, explain how to find the first quartile of a set of data

Answer 1

I would sort the data...find the median...then find the median of the lower half of the data

Answer 2

Okay, this one takes a bit more explaining... so gimme a minute to write you an example :)

Answer 3

As Zarkon (and congrats Zarkon on the moddom :)) said you sort your data.

So imagine this is your data set: 1,5,8,5,8,9,10,1,4
So you put it in number order:
1,1,4,5,5,8,8,9,10.
Then you find the median: the median is the "middle number".
So count all of your numbers, see how many there are, half that and count to the middle so:
1[no.1],1[no.2],4[no.3]....etc
So we find that there are 10 numbers, so the middle would be just after the fifth number. The 5th and 6th number is 5 and 8, so our median is halfway between 5 and 8 which is 6.5
Then our first quartile is halfway between the median and the first number. There are 5 numbers in between our median and the first number so our 'middle' is at the third number which is 4.

Does that make sense?