Normal Curve
Definition
A normal curve, also known as bell curve or Gaussian distribution, represents data that clusters around a mean or average. It’s symmetrically balanced with half of all scores falling above and below the mean.
Analogy
Imagine you're playing darts blindfolded at different distances from the target. Most likely your darts will cluster around some central point (the mean), but there'll be some outliers too far left or right (representing extreme scores). That pattern your darts make? That's similar to how data falls in a normal curve!
Related terms
Standard Deviation: This measures how spread out numbers are from their average value.
Mean: This is simply another name for average - it’s calculated by adding up all values and dividing by number of values.
Outliers: These are values significantly distant from other observations in a data set.
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