Which display gives you a better understanding of the data?

Question

The data represents the responses in degree Fahrenheit collected to answer the question how hot is the sidewalk during the school day 92,95,95,95,98,100,100,100,103,105,111,112,115,115,116,117,117,118,119,119,119,119,119,119

Which display gives you a better understanding of the data?

The ____ (answer options dot plot or histogram) gives a better feel for the date because it displays that the temperature of the sidewalk was between 115 and 120 degrees F ___ (answer options 10 or 12) times and that the temperature was between 90 and 115 degrees F the rest of the time.

Answer 1

A dot plot is a type of histogram that has a bin size of 1 (It is good for showing your data explicitly). The histogram allows you to see the data grouped in bins of multiple degrees like counting all the temperatures that are between 115 to 120 and 110 to 115 and 105 to 110, etc. This would be useful as the answer would just be to read off the frequency of temperatures between 115 and 120. Honestly, it doesn't gain you that much and usually the rule for histograms is to include the higher integer values and omit the lower integer values at the ends. Should we count the 115s since we only have integer values of temperature? If there were large numbers and the temperatures were to the nearest tenth degree, it wouldn't matter. There is some ambiguity in the question as to whether the endpoints of the interval 115 and 120 are included.