3 Interpreting data in table

In Section 2, the main concern was with producing a table of data, for others to read, that communicates clearly the important patterns or messages in the data. In this section, the focus changes slightly. Your role will be that of the reader or user of the data in a table, and you will learn about approaches that make it easier for you to extract information from a table. However, manipulating tabular data into a form that makes it clearer to others will also, very often, make it clearer to you as well. So the approaches introduced in Section 2 will be useful in this section too. You will have more practice in choosing and calculating appropriate ratios and rates for tabular data. You will also see examples where it is appropriate to go one step further than you did in Section 2: rather than leaving the data in tabular form, relevant graphs will be drawn as well.