Joey received a report that he scored in the 97th percentile on a national standardized reading test but in the 72nd percentile on the math portion of the test. explain to joey’s grandmother, who knows no statistics, what these numbers mean.

Joey scored in the 97th percentile for reading which means that he scored higher than 97% of the people that took the reading test. This puts him in the top 3% of people that took the test. The same reasoning works for the math portion of the test, he scored higher than 72% of people which puts him in the top 28%. This also means that he did much better on the reading portion than on the math. If only 100 people took the math and reading tests, he would have done better than 72 people on the math and 97 people on the reading.