Item in a List

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l, 17.2, 12.2, 7.2, 22.2

What is the value of l in the list above?

(1)

(2) The median of the numbers in the list is 14.7.

Review: Item in a List




Explanation

We're given a list here. It's not necessarily a meaningful group of numbers unless we are told so. They are not in order, we can see. And the fact they all end in .2 doesn't necessarily mean anything. There are a few typical types of question about lists on the GMAT; we might have to compute an average of the numbers, by which we mean their mean, or their mode or median, or their standard deviation. It turns out we just want the value of l, which may or may not be smallest in the list. Moving on to the statements, separately first. Statement (1) doesn't give us enough information: l could be almost anything. Insufficient. Statement (2) gives more information, since we have a median. If we put the list elements in order, we get



We can see that l has to be right in the middle, so it can be the median. Since we have an odd number of elements, including l, the median is simply the middle number, and since that is 14.7 and is not otherwise represented, we must have . Statement (2) is sufficient.

The correct answer is (B).


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