Descriptive statistics is used to describe and summarize key characteristics of a data set. Commonly used measures include central tendency, such as the mean, median, and mode, and measures of dispersion like range, interquartile range, standard deviation, and variance. The mean is the average value calculated by summing all values and dividing by the number of values. The median is the middle value when data is arranged in order. The mode is the most frequently occurring value. Measures of dispersion describe how spread out the data is, such as the difference between highest and lowest values (range) or how close values are to the average (standard deviation).