CIMA Fundamentals of Management Accounting (BA2) Practice Exam

The key idea is that the mean (the everyday average) of ungrouped data is found by adding every value and dividing by how many values there are. You use each data point individually, not any grouping or class intervals. This gives a single representative value that summarizes the data set. The maximum value is just the largest observation, not an average. The mean of squared deviations relates to dispersion, not the overall average of the data points. So the correct approach is to take the sum of all values and divide by the number of values.