In interpreting statistical data, if half the observations are above the number 8 and half are below, what is the number 8 called?

The number 8 is referred to as the median, which is the value that separates a dataset into two equal halves. When half the observations in a dataset are above a certain number and half are below that number, that particular number represents the median. This concept is crucial in statistics because the median indicates the central point of the data, providing a more accurate measure of central tendency in skewed distributions compared to the mean.

In contrast, the mode is the number that appears most frequently in a dataset, which is unrelated to the position of values relative to one another. The mean, often referred to as the average, is calculated by summing all values and dividing by the count of the values; it can be influenced by extreme values in a dataset. The term "average" generally refers to the mean, but can sometimes be used to describe other measures of central tendency. In this case, since the focus is on the position within the ordered data, median is the appropriate term for the number that divides the dataset as described.