Asample of 50 11th graders were asked to select a favorite pattern out of 6 choices. the following display shows what their favorite color patterns were.

blue on gray 4
green 9
pink polka dots ?
purple 11
red and orange stripes 9
yellow 3

the counts have been recorded in the accompanying table according to pattern and the number of students who selected the pattern. what is missing value in the table?

There a total of 50 11th graders who had to choose between 6 different color patterns. Among the 6 patterns, only the students who had chosen the pink polka dots are missing. To look for this missing value, simply subtract 50 to the sum of all of the known values of the 5 other colors to obtain the number of students who had picked pink polka dots. This is shown below:

50 - 4 - 9 - 11 - 9 - 3 = x
X = 14

Therefore, there were 14 students who chose pink polka dots.