A certain health maintenance organization (HMO) examined the number of office visits by each of its members in the last year. For this data set, we would anticipate that the geometric mean would be
A)a reasonable measure of center.
B)zero because some HMO members would not have an office visit.
C)too high because the distribution is likely to be skewed to the left.
D)negative because some data values would be below the mean.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The geometric mean is not suitable for data sets that include zero values because the geometric mean of any set of values that includes at least one zero is zero. Since some HMO members might not have any office visits, resulting in a count of zero for those members, the geometric mean would be zero.

A Certain Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) Examined the Number of Office