Why is it not legitimate to average percentages

Convert to percentage form by multiplying 0. The average percentage removed equals 40 percent. He writes about business, personal finance and careers.

Adkins holds master's degrees in history and sociology from Georgia State University. He became a member of the Society of Professional Journalists in Related Articles How to Calculate Average. How to Calculate the Percentage of Another Number. How to Convert Whole Numbers to Percentages. How to Calculate the Percentage of Something From a How to Calculate Percent Off. Origin Batting average was created as a measure to judge the success of a hitter. In A Call "average," as a verb: "he's batting" or "he's hitting".

More from Standard Stats. Connect with MLB. Read on to unravel the rest of this arithmetic mystery. It is normally, though not always, used as an alternative way of expressing a decimal number between 0 and But in your mind, the latter term most likely conveys the mathematical message of "just under three-fourths" far better than the decimal version does.

Mathematically, an average is just the sum of the individual data points heights, speeds, etc. An average can be conceived of as the most likely number to emerge randomly from an existing set of related numbers, such as quiz scores. Thus, if you knew a student had taken this quiz but had no further information, intuition would suggest that this student's score is more likely to be 80 than 60, 70 or As you might guess, percentages are often used when a number is used to convey odds, ratios or chances rather than strict totals.

You might be interested in, for example, the percentage of days it rains in April in a given location if you're planning a vacation there, or the percentage of total shots a basketball player makes. For example, if there are , children and , adults surveyed, as shown below.

However, this is an exception and is not commonly found in real world applications. Therefore, we should be careful to not average percentages. I hope this helps clarify a common misconception.