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Teaching mathematics
Teaching mathematics

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Understanding and interpreting pie charts

Pie charts use different sized sectors of a circle to represent data.

The pie chart below represents the first instrument played by a sample of people.

Described image
Figure _unit9.3.6 Figure 22 A pie chart

Understanding this pie chart

In this example, the most common instrument is the piano. This can be seen easily as the light blue part of the pie chart, representing the piano, is much larger than any of the other sectors.

It is also straightforward to see that ¼ of the people in this sample had a guitar as their first instrument. You can see this because the angle within the dark blue section, representing guitar, is 90°.

Using this information, you know that if the total number of people in this survey was 80, there must be 20 people who play guitar (80 divided by 4).

Similarly, if you knew that 6 people play guitar, you could work out that the total number of people in the sample must be 24 (6 × 4).