Chapter 4
Organizing Quantitative Data: Charts and Graphs
IN THIS CHAPTER
Making and interpreting histograms
Recognizing misleading histograms
Making and interpreting box plots
Understanding line graphs
Quantitative data comes to you in the form of measurements of some kind, where the numbers make sense as numbers (and not as placeholders for categories). Statisticians use different types of charts and graphs to organize quantitative data; in this chapter, you experience histograms, box plots, and line graphs (also known as time charts.) Depending on your situation, you can use them to look at how the data are distributed among the values, where the “middles” of the data are, how spread out the data are, or how they look over time — all important characteristics of a data set.
Even though you may not see all the graphs and charts in this chapter put out by the media, you see them with great frequency in your statistics class, so you need to be very comfortable with all of them and their interpretation. This chapter helps you settle in.
Creating a Histogram
A histogram is a bar ...
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