Practice for Graphing

You are in charge of personnel at Dr. Evil's potato-chip company and you must keep track of the number of sick days people take. You count the numbers of days sick each employee takes and then tally up the frequency for each number of sick days taken. These data appear below:

Days Sick	frequency
0	6
1	2
2	4
3	5
4	11
5	15
6	22
7	6
8	7
9	2

1) What type of measurement scale is "Days Sick" measured on?

2) What type of graph (bar graph, line graph, or histogram) should you create to display these data?

3) Create that graph.

Example 3

You conduct research on problem solving and in a recent study you had subjects complete simple puzzles and difficult puzzles. You measured the time to the nearest minute that each individual required to complete each the simple puzzle and the difficult puzzle. You could how many people solved each puzzle to the nearest minute. The frequencies for each type of puzzle are below:

Time to Finish Puzzle	Simple Puzzle f	Difficult Puzzle f
2 minutes	1	0
3 minutes	5	0
4 minutes	6	0
5 minutes	12	0
6 minutes	15	3
7 minutes	13	2
8 minutes	2	5
9 minutes	1	5
10 minutes	0	6
11 minutes	0	15
12 minutes	0	19

1) What type of measurement scale is "Time to Finish Puzzle" measured on?

2) What type of graph (bar graph, line graph, or histogram) should you create to display these data?

3) Create that graph.

Answers to Example 1

1) "Class" is measured on a nominal scale.

2) A bar graph

3) Here is the graph:

Answers to Example 2

1) "Days Sick" is measured on an ratio scale and it is a discrete measurement.

2) A histogram

3) Here is the graph:

Answers to Example 3

1) "Time to Finish Puzzle" is on a ratio scale and it is continuous.

2) A line Graph

3) Here is that graph: