Fiber length is one of the most important physical properties of cotton. Frequently, it is necessary to compare the fiber lengths of various cottons. The commonly used statistical characteristics of a cotton fiber length distribution include the mean fiber length, short fiber content, and upper quartile length. These statistics may be calculated from number-based or weight-based distributions. This paper shows theoretically and experimentally that number-based and weight-based statistics may give opposite rank orders in some cases when they are used to compare cotton fiber lengths.
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