average
part of speech
noun (average, averages); adjective (average); verb (average, averages, averaged, averaging)
meaning for a pupil
1) The average (mean) is the number you get when you share a total equally: add the numbers, then divide by how many there are. tree →
2) Average means usual or ordinary, not special. tree →
3) To average a number is to have it as the average: «He averages 10 points a game». tree →
sense in the lessons
a mean: the sum of the values divided by their count; in everyday life, average temperature, average height, average speed; phrases «on average», «above average», «below average»
examples
- The average of 4, 6 and 8 is 6. tree →
- She scored an average of 80 points. tree →
- The average class has 25 pupils. tree →
- On average he reads 15 pages a day. tree →
- July has the highest average temperature. tree →
- It was just an average day. tree →
- Her marks are above average. tree →
- The car averaged 50 miles an hour. tree →
- The average of 2, 3 and 10 is 5. tree →
- An average adult sleeps about 8 hours. tree →
note
Average = total ÷ number of values; total = average × number. Trap: you cannot average two averages if the groups are different sizes. The average does not have to be one of the numbers. Mean, median and mode are different kinds of average.
In the corpora
- People in the Netherlands grew about 20 centimetres taller on average over about 150 years, mostly thanks to better food and health.
- Slang: «lush» (Wales) means lovely; «mid» means average.
- A one percent chance means about one in a hundred, on average, not one in every hundred tries for sure.
- In Vancouver, Lin's Mandarin is «mid» (Gen Z slang for just average).
- The ice sheet covering Antarctica is on average about 2 km thick and holds roughly 70 percent of the world's fresh water.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «average» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.