Business Statistics

88 Business Statistics

3.5.18.2  Demerits

1. It is difcult to compute.

2. When there are positive and negative values in a series or when one or more items are zero, then

it is difcult to compute.

3. It gives more importance to smaller values. This merit of harmonic mean is a demerit in itself.

This property of harmonic mean becomes a hindrance in its wide use with regard to economical

data.

3C1. Compute the harmonic mean from the following data series:

4.0; 3.5; 5.0; 11.0; 340.0; 0.8; 0.804; 0.040;

5000; 0.088.

3C2. Compute the harmonic mean from the following

distribution:

Class interval Frequency

0–50 7