Mode

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#17 - Mode

It was a cool afternoon Friday and I had just arrived home from school. My dad greeted me and asked if I would like to help him shop for groceries. Luckily, my teachers had decided not to assign any homework since we were approaching the end of the semester. I enter the bustling grocery store with a list of produce we needed to restock. When I found the avocados, I couldn’t help but notice the stickers with fine print on them. I examined the text closer to learn that these avocados came from Mexico. As I shopped for more produce, I continued to look at these labels, curious about how often my produce would be from Mexico. Below is the data I collected at a large chain grocery store.

As I collected the data, I realized I could connect my understanding of mode to the data. The mode of a data set is a value that appears the most often. There isn’t a direct equation or formula to find the mode, but instead, it can be found by analyzing data. For instance, if we list the ages of students from a daycare, the mode would represent the most frequently shown age from that daycare. By applying this mathematical concept, we can calculate the mode of the fruits and vegetables we eat being from different places of the world.

When using the mode, we can see how often produce items come from certain countries. After collecting data on the various origins of produce, I compiled the data into a bar chart. Then, we can quickly identify the mode, or the most frequently shown value. Mexico, which made up 13 out of the 35 items, was the most commonly seen produce origin. The mode of the data is shown in the chart below.

Through this investigation, I learned that mode can be applied to many aspects of life, even just by looking at produce. However, there were some limitations within our approach. Firstly, during my data collection, most of the products from the United States did not list which state they were from. Without this information, I was not able to fully reflect how much produce is from a local source. Additionally, a handful of produce items didn’t list a country of origin, which was reflected in the bar charts. This made a gap in the results and ultimately affected the mode calculated. With this in mind, why would the origin of produce matter? Produce from larger supermarkets, like the one I viewed during my research, are being transported by large carbon-emitting vehicles. As we continue to ship fruits and vegetables from places further away, we are also leaving a larger carbon footprint. We can significantly reduce this carbon footprint by supporting our local farmers at the farmer’s market or local grocers.