Maths Coursework - “The Average Person”.

Thomas Parry, Yr 11, Holden.

Year 11 Maths Coursework

The aim of our project is to investigate “The Average Person”. This is the title that we received off our teacher; it doesn’t really give us any idea of what exactly it wants us to investigate. So we took it upon ourselves to decide what we should investigate. We had a brain storming session and here are the ideas that we came up with:

Height
Weight
Head Circumference
Arm Span
Shoe Size
Reaction Times

From these ideas we decided that it would take us quite a long time to gather all of the relevant data from our class. So, what we decided to do was to split ourselves into groups. After splitting into our groups each group was assigned a specific area to collect data from.

Method

Height → to get an exact height we placed a measure along the straight edge of a white board and we placed a book on the head of the person that was having his/hers height measured and the reading would be from the bottom of the book. We took all of our measurements in centimetres.
Weight → we took an ordinary set of scales and when the people were being weighed they would be made to take off their shoes and school jackets so that we could take a more accurate reading. ...

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Method

Height → to get an exact height we placed a measure along the straight edge of a white board and we placed a book on the head of the person that was having his/hers height measured and the reading would be from the bottom of the book. We took all of our measurements in centimetres.
Weight → we took an ordinary set of scales and when the people were being weighed they would be made to take off their shoes and school jackets so that we could take a more accurate reading. We took all of our weights in Kilograms.
Head Circumference → to take the measurements for this we used a tape measure and simply stretched it around the head of the person that we were taking data from at the time. We took all of the readings in centimetres. Their was one problem with this method, this was the fact that every time that you were going to stretch the tape measure around the persons head you were never going to get in exactly the same place on everybody’s head every single time so the readings may not all be totally reliable.
Arm Span → we made two marks on the wall that showed us where a metre was and then we would place the tip of our middle finger on one of the marks and then we spread our arms out wide and then we would make a mark where the other middle finger ended up and then we would measure the distance between the one metre mark and the mark that our finger ended up on.
Hand Span → we measured this simply by sticking a measure to the straight edge of a table and then placing our hands on top of it stretched out.
Shoe Size → we took every bodies shoe size easily by them telling us what size shoe they take, as they are the ones that know the best.
Reaction Time → we measured this by having a ruler and then someone would drop it and we would have to catch it as quickly as possible and then the reaction time would be figured out from the distance that it took for us to catch the ruler.

After we had taken the results for our own class we got the results from another class so that we could get some sort of comparison from them and also because of the fact that it would work better with a larger number of results because we can get a clear idea of the kind of correlation that we have appearing.

Once we had got all of the results I will put the results in a data table, and then from there I will generate some graphs that will hopefully help people to see the results more clearly.

We can compare some of the sets of data that we collected, put them into graphs and see if they come out with any types of correlation (e.g. Positive or Negative correlation). The pieces of data that I would probably select to compare that I think would produce any types of correlation are: