But saying “the global average” suggests a meaning of “average” such that there is only one of. So it cannot generically mean “measure of central tendency” there.
In colloquial language, an average is the sum of a list of numbers divided by the number of numbers in the list. In mathematics and statistics, this would be called the arithmetic mean. In statistics, mean, median, and mode are all known as measures of central tendency.
Basically it says that “average” is not a mathematical or statistical term but means “arithmetic mean” which is the proper expression to use in math/stat context.
My math books and stat classes used to define average as the hypernym of mean and mode. Wikipedia has the same terminology.
Wolfram Alpha says that it assumes you mean the “arithmetic mean”. It’s likely useful to make that assumption but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way.
Today I learned the words “hypernym” and “hyponym”!
(Wikipedia: “Hyponymy and hypernymy”; oxforddictionaries dot com: “hypernym”, “hypernymy”, “hyponym”, “hyponymy”.)
Related useful words are meronym and holonym.
But saying “the global average” suggests a meaning of “average” such that there is only one of. So it cannot generically mean “measure of central tendency” there.
English Wikipedia says:
Basically it says that “average” is not a mathematical or statistical term but means “arithmetic mean” which is the proper expression to use in math/stat context.