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Histograms, Box & Whiskers Plots, and Other Made-Up-Sounding-Things


Histograms? That sounds hard...


Actually, everything we are going to talk about today is easy.

Histograms are a frequency table, that is, the height represents how frequently that value appeared. For example:


Apparently, the most common height for a Black Cherry tree in this study was between 75-80 ft.

Let's get some data about the class: maybe "when do you wake up?," "how tall are you?," and/or anything else interesting.

Now we'll chunk the data - divide it into bins. In the cherry tree example, the bins are "trees of height 60-65 feet, 65-70 feet,... etc" As a side note, when I say 60-65 and 65-70 are separate bins, what do I mean? Where does 65 go?

Alright, let's pick one of the measurements, put them in order from smallest to greatest, and find a few things:


  1. The minimum (the smallest value)
  2. The maximum (the largest value)
  3. The median (median is the one in the middle)
  4. The upper quartile (the number between the median and the maximum)
  5. The lower quartile (the number between the minimum and the median)
If we were to graph those, we would get a Box and Whisker Plot:


Though they are always drawn horizontally in middle school math class, I have only seen them drawn vertically out in the wild:


Hopefully they still make sense when they are rotated.

Anyway, if you get that you should have no problem with your classwork. (Note: there are ideas in the classwork that I didn't explicitly say. But I gave you all the pieces you need to figure it out. And you can ask questions):
Shape of distributions
Clusters, Gaps, Peaks, and Outliers

Finally, for homework, some review:

Writing Fractions as Repeating Decimals
Rewriting Decimals as Fractions

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