500
In the story The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo is told that the average number of children in a family is 2.58. You know that a 0.58 boy or girl cannot exist. How can the calculations for the mean produce a number representing a child that does not seem to make sense?
What is you are dividing the total number of children among many families. If each family has two children and there are some children left over, they must be
divided equally among all the families. Since you are dealing with the distribution of numbers, this comes up mathematically as a fraction of a number. The mean of the distribution would be a whole number only if the number of families were a factor of the number of children.