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Teaching mathematics
Teaching mathematics

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Bar charts

Bar charts are used to represent categorical data, such as favourite colours, and discrete numerical data, such as the number of children in a group of families.

In a bar chart the height of each bar represents the frequency corresponding to each category (Figure 18).

A bar chart showing favourite genres of films.
Figure 18 A bar chart
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A bar chart showing favourite genres of films. The horizonal labels are: comedy, romance, horror, action, sci-fi. The vertical axis shows the frequency and the axis is labelled from 0 to 12. The frequencies of each bar (in order) are: 10, 11, 5, 8, 2.

Figure 18 A bar chart

Activity 12 Reading data from a bar chart

Timing: Allow 5 minutes
  1. How many people prefer sci-fi films?
  2. How many people like comedy and romance films?
  3. How many people were asked in this survey?

Discussion

  1. Two people prefer sci-fi films.
  2. There are 21 (10 + 11) people who like comedy and romance films.
  3. A total of 36 people were asked (the sum of the frequencies).