One of the simplest ways to assess dispersion in your data is to compare the minimum and maximum. The minimum is the smallest value in a data set, and the maximum is the largest value.

Minimum and maximum are used to calculate the range, which is a statistic that is often used to describe dispersion in data sets. The range is simply the maximum - minimum. Notice that the range is very sensitive to extreme values.

For the precipitation data the minimum is 1 and the maximum is 10.

For the precipitation data the range is: 10 - 1 = 9

Even though most of the data lies between the values of 1 and 5 (a range of 4), the extreme value of 10 results in a range of 9 for the sample.