3 Handling data
3.1 Graphs
Information is everywhere these days - in the form of images, written records, tables and graphs. In this part of the course we want you to realise how useful graphs can be to analyse numerical information, and to show you some techniques that can help you decide how reliable this numerical information is.
It's often difficult to spot a trend or a relationship in a long list of numbers. Because the human mind is highly adapted to recognising visual patterns, it is often much easier to understand a series of numbers or measurements by representing them visually as a graph.