The document discusses the interquartile range (IQR), which represents the distance between the 25th and 75th percentiles of a data set. It is useful for measuring the spread of rank-ordered or highly skewed data. For rank-ordered data, the IQR indicates the spread between the first and third quartiles. For skewed data, the IQR is more representative of central tendency than the standard deviation since it is not affected by outliers as much.