Average out
Today’s expression is a phrasal verb, “to average out.” This is a unique one, and you use when you’re talking about data, numbers. And typically, it’s when you’re talking about data that has a lot of variation or a lot of noise, but nevertheless, you can still draw some conclusions about the data.
Here’s how you heard it earlier. We were talking about the body temperature measurements, specifically the one study that established 98.6 as the normal body temperature. And I was wondering, you know, did that study have some type of bias? For example, was it taken of only sick people? Or is it possible the instrumentation wasn’t calibrated properly? Whatever: is there some reason not to trust that conclusion? That was my question.
The most study that came out looked at several data sets, from different sources, over a longer period of time. So you would expect that the variations of one individual doctor’s instruments, or the bias of one study, would average out over time, over the much larger data set.
What I mean here is that, when you have really large amounts of data, you can accept a little bit of imperfection in any one given part of the data set. Obviously, you prefer perfect data. But if there were some flaw in some part of the data, it would probably average out over a lot of different observations. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.
We use “average out” by saying that an error or an outlier or a data set with a lot of variations averages out. That means that, okay maybe one study is biased and gives readings that are too high. But maybe another one is too low. A couple of those in a huge data set, and it will average out. The important thing is that there’s no bias one way or another over the whole data set you have.
Let me give you another example. In this example, it simply means that we’re calculating the average over numbers that are variable—they’re very different. It’s a new year, so I always look back on my spending from the previous year in different categories. So I looked at my gas bill from 2019, and I mean, natural gas at home. In my apartment, I use natural gas for the hot water heater, the stove and oven, and most importantly for my furnace. Chicago, where I live, is cold in the winter and hot in the summer. So there is a lot of variation in the amount of gas that I use.
The lowest month was June and July, which were both $48. The highest month was last February and that was $88. And the other months were scattered between those two extremes. But my gas bill averaged out to $60 per month. We say “average out” because there’s a lot of variation. The highest month was almost double the lowest month; not quite, but almost double. $48 to $88. So there’s a lot of variation, but it averages out to $60 per month.
I think we say “average out” to almost say that, if you ignore the variations, here’s what it is. How much TV do you watch a day? For me, there are a lot of days where I don’t turn the TV on a single time. Actually today is one of those days. The TV has not gone on, and it won’t. Zero today. I have other days where I watch a football game in the afternoon and a movie at night. That can be five hours. I don’t have a lot of those days, but I do have them. I would say my TV time averages out to an hour a day. In baseball season, I watch more games and I usually have a game on while I’m doing other things. In the winter, not as much. But over a year, I think my TV habits average out to about an hour a day.
JR’s song of the week
It’s Thursday, so we have a song of the week. It was supposed to be last week’s song, but I pre-empted JR. So it’s this week—and this is a good one. I had never heard of this one until today—“Growing Up” by the band Run River North. Run River North is a Korean-American band based in Los Angeles; their music is like indie rock. I really like the song “Growing Up.” It’s about taking advantage of the time you have and having the courage to be happy and go after your own happiness. Good job, JR; this is a good song. “Growing Up” by Run River North.
That’s it for today. Thanks for joining us for episode 231. If you have kids, remember, if the fever is 99.5, let ‘em stay home. That’s two degrees above normal now! Don’t forget, we’ll be right back here again on Monday. Have a great weekend.
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Use realistic expressions like a native speaker
