Discovering Statistics; Chapter 4

Question 1

What is chart junk?

Answer 1

3D effects, fill effects etc. that aren’t necessary for producing an effective graph.

Question 2

What is the vertical axis called?

Answer 2

y-axis or ordinate.

Question 3

What is the horizontal axis called?

Answer 3

x-axis or abscissa.

Question 4

What are histograms used for?

Answer 4

Can be referred to as frequency distributions. Useful for looking at the shape of your data.

Question 5

What are boxplots used for?

Answer 5

Can be referred to as ‘box-whisker diagrams’. Useful for displaying your data; at the centre of the plot is the median, the box itself displays the interquartile range and the ‘whiskers’ show the upper and lower quartiles.

Question 6

What are bar charts used for?

Answer 6

Way to display the means of different groups.

Question 7

What are scatterplots used for?

Answer 7

Useful for plotting each persons score on one variable against their score on another (telling us the relationship between two variables).

Question 8

What are line charts used for?

Answer 8

Same as bar charts, but use lines instead of bars.