Answer: Choice A) The values are similar (close) to the mean.
Absolute value represents distance on a number line. For example, |-3| = 3 tells us that -3 is 3 units away from zero on the number line. This applies to absolute deviations as well. We measure how far each data value is from the mean using absolute values. Finding the mean of the absolute deviations tells us the average distance from the mean. The smaller the mean absolute deviation (MAD), the closer the data points will be to the mean. The larger the MAD gets, the more spread out the data set will be. You can think of the MAD similar to the standard deviation.
