Imagine you and your friends each have a different number of candies, as shown by the orange bars. You decide to make it fair so that everyone has the same number of candies. You combine all the candies into one big pile, represented by the orange rectangle on the right. The total number of candies in the pile is the sum of all the candies you and your friends initially had.

You then divide this big pile equally among everyone. The number of candies that each person gets is the "mean" or the "average," which is shown by the purple dashed line. In this case, everyone would get about 9.5 candies if you could split a candy in half.