If the rent $900 is eliminated from the list, what effect would it have on the mean rent?

When a particular value, such as a rent of $900, is removed from a dataset, it has a direct impact on the calculation of the mean. The mean is calculated by summing all the values in the dataset and then dividing by the number of values. If the removed value is greater than the previous mean, it reduces the total sum of the data while also decreasing the count of data points, thereby generally resulting in a lower mean.

In this case, if $900 is eliminated and assuming that this value is above the current mean of the remaining rents, it creates a situation where the total sum of rents decreases while the count of rentals also decreases. However, the decrease in total value caused by removing a larger-than-mean number leads to a more significant impact due to the ratio involved in calculating the mean.

So, if $900 was above the average rent initially, removing it will decrease the mean. It is important to note that if $900 was below the mean or equal to it, the effect could be different, but the scenario presented generally supports that the mean rent will decrease when $900 is taken out, confirming that the mean rent will indeed decrease.