Levels of measurement - what you can and can't do arithmetically

6. Activity - exploring permissable operations

Here’s a spreadsheet listing a number of people. Females are assigned 1 and males 2. Their heights, temperatures and shoe sizes are also recorded. The shoe sizes are converted to mm using a look up table.

Click on the total boxes for each column to see what’s permitted.

Name	Sex	Height (m)	Temp °C	Shoe Size	Shoe Size (mm)
Anne	1	1.46	36.86	4	245
Tim	2	1.87	37.02	10	298
Mathew	1	1.76	37.07	8	278
Sheila	1	1.34	36.78	5	252
Soraya	1	1.70	36.64	6	260
Ben	2	1.77	36.97	9	286
Bob	2	1.89	37.01	11	305
Sue	1	1.82	36.83	8	278
Total?	Yes No No	Yes No 13.61	Yes No 295.18	Yes No No	Yes No 2202
Mean?	Yes No No	Yes No 1.70	Yes No 36.898	Yes No No	Yes No 275.3
Median?	Yes No No	Yes No 1.77	Yes No 36.915	Yes No 8	Yes No 278

Shoe Size

Shoe size is tradionally an ordinal measurement but can be converted to a ratio measurement using a look up table.

Shoe Size	Euro	mm
4	37	245
5	38	252
6	39	260
7	41	270
8	42	278
9	43	286
10	45	298
11	46	305

Convert Shoe Size to milimeters (mm)

Restart Activity

Begin Activity