The term "average" refers to a central value that represents a set of numbers. It is commonly calculated by adding all the values together and then dividing by the total number of values. This method is known as the arithmetic mean and is widely used in statistics to summarize data. Averages can help compare different sets of data, such as the average score of students in a class or the average temperature in a city. Other types of averages include the median, which is the middle value, and the mode, which is the most frequently occurring value in a dataset.