I am doing an analysis of a group of health centers scattered through a city. I'm trying to find, for a group of zip codes, how many of the health centers are within 5 miles of each zip code; then, I want to take an average. I'd like to say, for example, "On average, there are N centers within 5 miles of a given zip code in group A, and K within 5 miles of those in group B."
My question is, if (for example) in a group of 5 zip codes I come up with 3, 2, 0, 1, and 1 "nearby" centers, should I say that there are on average 1.4 centers near a given zip code, or should I say that there is 1?
Owing to the rules of significant figures, since the fraction you'd get is $7/5$, with the $5$ as a given constant, you'd go to a precision of one place.
Thus, it'd be $1$ instead of $1.4$.
Though personally, this doesn't seem like the kind of problem that you'd use significant figures for, since significant figures are primarily meant to contend with inaccuracies and human errors in measurement. But I'll assume you know more about the context of this problem than I do.