Question

For which of these would you use a histogram to show the data?
A) The number of letters for different areas in a postman’s bag.
B) The height of competitors in an athletic meet.
C) The number of cassettes produced by 5 companies
D) The number of passengers boarding trains from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. at a station.
Give the reason for each.

Answer 1

Hint: Here, we will use that histograms are a special form of bar chart where the data represents continuously rather than discrete categories and there are no gaps between columns representing the different categories.

Complete step by step solution:
We know that histograms are a special form of bar chart where the data represents continuously rather than discrete categories.
Since we also know that a histogram is a plot that lets you discover and show the underlying frequency distribution of a set of continuous data.
So we have that in a histogram there are no gaps between columns representing the different categories.
1) We know we cannot use the histogram in the case of the number of letters for different areas in a postman’s bag because we cannot define the class interval for this data.
2) We can use histogram here because it will be easy to divide the data into class intervals.
As we know that the height of competitors is continuous data, so there are no gaps between the data.
3) We do not have approximate data, we won't use a histogram.
 We do not know about the number of cassettes produced by companies.
4) We use the histogram in this case because it will be easy to divide the data into class intervals.
We also know that the train timings are continuous data, the histogram can be easily made.

Note:
Students need to know that a histogram is the graphical representation of data where data is grouped into continuous number ranges and each range corresponds to a vertical bar. One should know that the horizontal axis displays the number range and the vertical axis is the amount of data that is present in each range. Also note that unlike a bar chart, there are no gaps between the bars although some bars might be absent reflecting no frequencies. This Is because a histogram is a continuous data set.