National Board Dental Hygiene Examination (NBDHE) Dental Hygienist Practice Test

Disable ads (and more) with a membership for a one time $2.99 payment

Prepare for the National Board Dental Hygiene Examination with engaging quizzes. Access a variety of multiple-choice questions, each with detailed explanations and study tips, to confidently pass your NBDHE!

Each practice test/flash card set has 50 randomly selected questions from a bank of over 500. You'll get a new set of questions each time!

Practice this question and more.

Which of the following accurately describes a characteristic of the mode in a data set?

It is the average of all values
It is always the highest value
It can be affected by extreme values
It is the most frequently occurring value

The correct answer is: It is the most frequently occurring value

The correct answer identifies the mode as the most frequently occurring value in a data set. The mode is a measure of central tendency that specifically represents the value that appears with the highest frequency. This characteristic makes it distinct from other measures such as the mean (average) and the median (the middle value when data is arranged in ascending order). Understanding the mode is essential in various contexts, especially in data analysis, as it can indicate trends or popular preferences in a set of values. Unlike the mean, which can be skewed by outliers or extreme values, the mode remains unaffected by such anomalies because it relies solely on frequency, not on the magnitude of the values. For example, in a scenario where the ages of a group of people are 22, 24, 22, 23, and 22, the mode is 22, since it appears more frequently than any other age. This property makes the mode particularly useful when dealing with categorical data, where identifying the most common category is often of interest.