Big Ideas Math: Modeling Real Life, Grade 8
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4. Choosing a Data Display
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Exercise 1 Page 256

What types of data displays do you know?

Example Solution: Bar graph or histogram, see solution.

Practice makes perfect

Let's recall the types of data displays we can use to describe a data set.

Data Display Type When Do We Use It?
Pictograph To show data using pictures
Dot Plot To show the number of times each value occurs in a data set
Stem-and-Leaf Plot To show how ordered numerical data are distributed
Box-and-Whisker Plot To show the variability of a data set by using quartiles
Circle Graph To show data as parts of a whole
Bar Graph To show frequencies of data values in specific categories
Histogram To show frequencies of data values in intervals of the same size
Line Graph To show how data change over time
Scatter Plot To show the relationship between two data sets using ordered pairs plotted in a coordinate plane

Now, we want to choose an appropriate data display for the following situation.

The population of the United States divided into age groups

Here we want to present the frequency which is the number of people that fall into a specific category — the age group. This means that we could use a bar graph or a histogram. Remember that, for a histogram, the age groups should be expressed as intervals of the same size. The bar graph for this situation could look like the following.

example histogram