Today’s SAT Question of the Day is about a bar chart:

We are asked to find the median number of days spent on business trips for the employees of this company.

For median, we have to put the elements of our dataset in order from smallest to largest – which has been done for us already in this case!  Now we just have to figure out where the median – or middle – is.

To me, the fastest way to that answer seems to be adding up the total number of employees represented on this chart, then dividing that by 2.  (Did you see the y-axis?  It’s the number of employees who took business trips of each given length.)

So, 5 + 6 + 5 + 8 + 6 + 1 = 31.  31 / 2 = 15.5,   Out of 31 employees, 15 are going to fall to the left of the median and 15 to the right; the 16th is the magic median employee that we seek.  When we start adding again from left to right, we get to 16 at 5 + 6 + 5, which means that that second group of 5 (which happens to represent day 22) contains our lucky 16th employee.  22 is our answer!

This is a great example of an SAT math problem that is not hard in the sense of the math – 5 + 6 … – but requires a careful reading of the instructions and of the chart’s labels in order to understand how to get to the right answer!