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Is the median of the set positive or negative?

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by gmattesttaker2 » Wed Feb 19, 2014 3:17 pm
Hello,

For the following:

Set S is made up of 15 integers, is the median of S positive or negative?

(1) There are more negative than positive elements in the set.
(2) Exactly one-third of the elements in S equals zero.

I got A but the OA is given as E. I was wondering whether this set can even include 0 since the question says that the set is made up of integers. Thanks for your help.

Best Regards,
Sri
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Source: — Data Sufficiency |
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by Uva@90 » Wed Feb 19, 2014 11:35 pm
gmattesttaker2 wrote:Hello,

For the following:

Set S is made up of 15 integers, is the median of S positive or negative?

(1) There are more negative than positive elements in the set.
(2) Exactly one-third of the elements in S equals zero.

I got A but the OA is given as E. I was wondering whether this set can even include 0 since the question says that the set is made up of integers. Thanks for your help.

Best Regards,
Sri
Sri,
Yes Zero is an Integer which is neither positive nor negative.

Regards,
Uva.
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by Matt@VeritasPrep » Thu Feb 20, 2014 2:41 pm
Another thing to watch out for (as Statement 2 implies) is that you can have more than one of each number in the set!

For instance, given Statement 1, our set could be {-2, -1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1}, which clearly has a median of 0.

Data Sufficiency is full of these kind of annoying details, unfortunately.
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by [email protected] » Thu Feb 20, 2014 10:10 pm
Hi Sri,

Did you transcribe this question correctly? I only ask because the wording of the question has some "bias" in it, depending on your interpretation.

The question COULD have originally asked "Is the median positive?" The implication is that the median is either positive (YES) OR 0 (NO) or negative (NO).

The way this question is written in your original post could be interpreted in 2 different ways:

1) "Is the median 'positive' or 'negative'?" The implication here is that the median is one or the other, but not 0.

2) "Is the median 'positive or negative'?" The implication here is that the median IS positive/negative (YES) or NOT positive/negative (a 0, NO).

GMAT questions are specifically worded to remove any kind of confusion or ambiguity, so you shouldn't run into this confusion on Test Day.

For the sake of addressing the statistical data:
-A set CAN include duplicates
-0 is an integer and thus could be in a set of integers
-The median of a group of number COULD be 0

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