Question: During the past few years, there has been a lot of discussion about the price of university textbooks. The complaints have come from many places, including students, faculty, parents, and even government officials. The publishing companies have been called on to explain why textbooks cost so much. Recently, one of the major publishing companies was asked to testify before a congressional panel in Washington, D.C. As part of the presentation, the president of the company organized his talk around four main areas: production costs, author royalties, marketing costs, and bookstore markup. He used one of his company's business statistics texts as an example when he pointed out the production costs-including editing, proofing, printing, binding, inventory holding, and distribution- come to about $32 per book sold. Authors receive $12 per copy for the hundreds of hours of creative work in writing the book and supplementary materials. Marketing costs are pegged at about $5 per copy sold and go to pay for the book sales force and examination copies sent to professors. The book is then sold to bookstores for $70 per copy, a markup on costs of about 40% to cover overhead and the publishing costs associated with many upper-division, low-market texts that lose money for the company. Once university bookstores purchase the book, they mark it up, placeit on the shelf, and sell it to the student. If books go unsold, they are returned to the publisher for a full refund. The following data reflect the dollar markup on the business statistics text for a sample of 20 college bookstores:
a. Compute the mean markup on the business statistics text by university bookstores in the sample.
b. Compute the median markup.
c. Determine the mode markup.
d. Write a short paragraph discussing the statistics computed in parts a-c.