Imagine you surveyed your friends and tallied their favorite colors.
To make it easier to understand your tally chart, we can draw it as a bar graph.
A bar graph shows information using rectangular bars of different heights and lengths.
The image below is a bar graph. It lets us easily compare groups or categories.
The height of each bar matches its tally.
Without looking at the numbers, can you tell which is the favorite color?
Yes, it's blue. It has the highest bar.
Which is the least favorite color?
Very good, red. It's the lowest bar.
It's easy to compare categories just by looking at their heights in the bar graph.
To know the exact value of each color, look at the top of each bar. Then trace a line to see which number it matches in the y-axis, the vertical line ↕️ on the left.
Let's see...
Is this statement true or false?
3 people have pink as their favorite color.
This is false. The graph shows that 4 people have pink as their favorite color.
How many people have green as their favorite color?
You got it, 5 people. ✅
You're doing really great.
Let's try making one.
Evan scored 70 points, Jenna got 90 points, Paul made 60 points, and Mike scored 80 points.
Let's plot this data as a bar graph.
First, draw a vertical line ↕️ and a horizontal line ↔️.
Label the horizontal line with the names of players.
Label the vertical line with possible game scores.
Let's write numbers that are multiples of 10.
Why multiples of 10?
Because the scores of the players are multiples of 10.
Tip: Make sure that the numbers on the y-axis includes the highest value in your data.
Now, how should we title this bar graph?
Did you say "Game Night Scores"? Good idea.
The next step is to draw rectangular bars to represent the value for each player's scores.
Evan has 70 points. On top of Evan's name, we draw a bar that reaches the 70 mark.
Jenna got 90 points. On top of Jenna's name, we draw a bar that has a height of 90.
Paul made 60 points. On top of Paul's name, we draw another bar that reaches the 60 mark.
Mike scored 80 points. On top of Mike's name, we draw a bar that goes up to 80.
Our bar graph is complete.
Now, we can easily compare the player's scores just by looking at it.
Who was the winner?
Yes, Jenna. She has the highest bar. 🎉
Who scored the least number of points?
Correct, Paul did. He needs to try harder in the next game night. 😂
The bar graph helped us compare the game scores easily.
Excellent job learning about bar graphs. 👏
Now, practice what you learned.