Georgia is fascinated with her teachers aquarium. She wants to create a graph to visually compare the number and different kinds of animals in her tank. What kind of graph should she use?

Question

Georgia is fascinated with her teachers aquarium. She wants to create a graph to visually compare the number and different kinds of animals in her tank. What kind of graph should she use?

Answer 1

Cadence,

Before we can decide on a chart (or graph), the first question we need to ask ourselves is the following:

"Of the things I'm trying to compare or show in this visualization, can they BOTH be represented by numbers? Or can only ONE thing be represented by numbers?"

In this case, the two things are:

1. The types of fish are represented by names like,
2. Goldfish
3. Guppies
4. Clownfish
5. The amounts of each type of fish which are represented by numbers

When only ONE of the things can be represented by numbers, this leaves us with the following options for charts (or graphs):

Bar Chart (also known as a bar graph or column chart represents the types of fish listed on one axis, and the numbers on the other axis)

Pictograph (like a bar chart, but instead of bars, you can draw little pictures of fish stacked to the same height/length as the bars in the bar chart). This option only works if you're dealing with a very small amount of information.

Pie Chart (this is if you want to visualize the percentages of each type of fish represented)

The other types charts (graphs) like scatter plots, line charts (line graphs), histograms, etc. all require at least TWO pieces of numerical information (distance and velocity, like money and time, or the frequency of something happening across a range of numbers, or etc.).

I leave you to decide which of the three types of charts (graphs) is best for Georgia.

Hopefully, that helps.

:-)

~Kristi