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Comparing Box and Whisker Plots

We can use the box and whisker plots above to compare the scores of boys and girls in a test.

	Boys	Girls
Range
Median
Lower Quartile
Upper Quartile
IQR = UQ – LQ

Comparison 1: The Boy’s Median is 11. The girl’s median is 1 more than this which suggests the girls’ have done better on average

Comparison 2: The Girls have a larger range, which suggests that (if we include the worst and best scores) then OVERALL the girls are less consistent.

HOWEVER, the girls have a smaller IQR (inter-quartile range) so this means than the MIDDLE 50% of GIRLS are more consistent than the boys middle 50% of scores.