Tidy Tables Statistics In Your World 
Student Notes
Teachers Notes
Different Tables
 
Building up a Table
 
Tidiness
 
Tables from Bar Charts
 
Peas in a Pod
 
Two-way Tables
 
Facts about Fires
 

Laying out Tables

Different Tables
Table 1 gives figures about fires in the home. Fire brigades were called to put them out. Many tables in statistics look like this. Some people find them hard to read. In this unit you will learn how to make tables and how to read and understand them. By the end you should be able to make more sense of them.

Cause Number started in Total4 number of fires
Kitchen Bedroom1 Living Room Hall2 Roof Space Elsewhere3 or not known
Cooking 17226 174 - - - - 17000
Space heating 504 1400 2352 168 - 1176 6000
Smoking Materials 342 1482 1216 76 - 684 4000
Children 132 990 330 165 33 1650 3000
Wiring Installations 403 403 310 527 155 1302 3000
Chimneys 153 272 289 17 255 714 2000
TV and radio 17 51 1547 - - 85 2000
Other 2840 3124 1704 710 426 5396 14000
Total all causes 21617 7896 7748 1663 869 11007 51000
     
  1 Includes bed-sitting rooms
  2 Includes stairs and corridors
  3 Includes fires which started outside and spread to the building
  4 Totals have been rounded to the nearest thousand.

Table 1 - Domestic fires in the United Kingdom: by cause and room of origin, 1976 - (Source: Social Trends, No. 8, 1977, page 197)

Not all tables are as difficult as Table 1.

What do you call the table you would use:
a to find times of buses or trains,
b to find out what nine sevens are,
c to find out which lesson you should be at?
d Write down one other table which you use to get information.

 

Building up a Table
You will need page R1.

Statistical tables contain lots of numbers. Sometimes we measure (length, area, weight, etc.)
Sometimes we count (the number of people, the number of fires, etc.)
In each case this numerical information is called DATA.
When we count, the numbers we get are called FREQUENCIES.

Data
Eleven children wrote down their favourite musical instrument. Here is what they wrote.

a How many different instruments did they choose?
b Which instrument was most popular?

It is easier to answer these questions from a table.
c Copy and complete Table 2.

This tells us how many children chose each instrument.
It is a FREQUENCY TABLE.
Instrument Frequency
Bagpipe 3
   
Total 11

Table 2

We can also see what fraction of children chose each instrument. 3 out of the 11 children chose 'bagpipe'.

This is a fraction 3/11.
d What fraction of the children chose the guitar?
e Write down your favourite kind of sweets (e.g. toffee, chocolate)
Give your answer to your teacher.
f Complete Table 5 on page Rl to show the favourite sweets of all the pupils in your class. Put in the frequencies (how many times each type of sweet was chosen). Don't forget to put the total at the bottom.

Tidiness
The word STATISTICS can also mean data. Sometimes statistics are carelessly laid out. The meaning of the figures is not always clear. We can tidy up as we put the figures into a table. A graph or bar chart may make the picture clearer still.

Figure 1 shows how to do this. It starts with a jumble of 10 pupils' bus fares. They are tidied into a table. In the bar chart the frequencies stand out clearly.

Jumbled data
8p   10p   6p   6p       6p
  6p             10p    
10p   8p   12p            
Table
Bus fare Frequency
6p 4
8p 2
10p 3
12p 1
Bar chart

Figure 1 - Bus fares
a Which fare came most often in the data?
b Which fare came least often?

The data are in three forms: jumbled, table, bar chart.
c Which form did you use to answer questions a and b?
d Make a bar chart to show the data of Table 2. (Your horizontal axis will be labelled 'instruments'.)

 

Tables from Bar Charts
You will need page R1.

Figure 2 - Children's Hair Colour

Figure 2 shows the hair colours of a group of children. We can work backwards to make a table from the bar chart.

Look at the bar chart.
a How many children had brown hair?
b Write this number in the right-hand column of Table 6 on page Rl against the word 'Brown'.
c Complete the rest of the table for the other hair colours.
d How many children were there altogether?
e How many children had hair colour beginning with "B"?
f What fraction of all the children is this?

Peas in a Pod
You will need page R1.

A market gardener wants to assess the quality of the pea seeds he planted. He counts the number of peas in each of a sample of pods. The results are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 - Number of peas in pod
a Use the data from Figure 3 to complete Table 7 on page Rl.
b How many pods were sampled?
c What was the most common number of peas in a pod?
d How many pods contained two peas? How many peas were there in these pods?

 

Two-way Tables
So far the tables have gone just one way. We read them going down the page. Two-way tables are read both down and across the page.

Each child in a class answered the question: 'Do you own a bicycle?' The number of replies are shown in Table 3.

  Owned a bicycle Didn't own a bicycle Totals
Boys
8
10
 
Girls
6
4
 
Totals      
Table 3

 

a How many boys owned a bicycle?
b How many girls didn't own a bicycle?
c How manv bicycles were owned by the class?
d How many girls were in the class?
e How many children were in the class?
f What fraction of the boys owned bicycles?
g What fraction of the girls owned bicycles?
h Who were better off for bicycles, boys or girls?

If your class includes both boys and girls, do i and j.
If it has only boys or only girls, your teacher will tell you what to do.
i Make a table like Table 3 but leave out the numbers.
j Complete the table, including totals, with data from your class.

 

Facts about Fires
You will need page R1.

Look at Table 8 on page R1. It is the same as Table 1.

a How many fires were recorded altogether?
b How many fires started in the living room?
c How many fires were caused by children?
d How many fires in the living room were caused by television or radio?
e How many chimney fires started in the roof space?
f Where did more fires start than anywhere else?
g What caused more fires than anything else?

 

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