Blog 4- Bar Graphs

Hello, I will be teaching you how to create and use bar graphs. Bar graphs make data easy to understand, especially for visual learners. The definition of a bar graph is: a set of bars to represent the frequency of each category.

Bar graphs are frequently used throughout various areas of study such as science, economics, math, etc. A bar graph is one of my favorite graphs because they simplify data and are able to really show the differences between data.

Here are a few examples of bar graphs:



The above examples show the data for favorite type of movie, with romantic being the highest. The other graph shows hours of television watched by students, with the most students watching 9-11 hours of television. These bar graphs show very simple data, but bar graphs can include more complex data as well.

Creating your own bar graph:

1. Find a set of data you want to depict in a bar graph. For example, lets create a bar graph for which months have the most days of snow.
-Data is as follows:
December- 2 days
January- 6 days
February- 14 days
March- 3 days
2. Draw out the y and x axis, as two perpendicular lines with the y axis vertical to the x axis which is horizontal.
3. Label the y axis as "Days of Snow"
4. Number the y axis starting at 0 where the x and y axis meet, and then go up the line counting by 2 until you reach 16.
5. Label the x axis as "Month"
6. At even intervals write out December, January, February, and March. (since these are the most common months for snow especially in Colorado)
7. Now create bars for each month that rise to the number of days relating to each month in your data.   So, the December bar will reach 2. January will go up to 6. February will go up to 14, and March will go to 3.
8. Now, shade in the bars of the graph in order to create a final product that is easy to understand and highlight the data the bars represent.
9. Finally, create a label for your graph. I suggest, "Days of Snow"

The final graph should look like this:



Bar graphs are important for representing data and showing a viewer how visually the data looks. They can be incredibly useful for visual learners, like me, who have a hard time looking at data if it is only represented in numbers. With a bar graph data is able to stand out and the viewer can really see which data is the lowest, highest, or if there are trends in the data. What is really cool about bar graphs is that they are not only restricted to math and you would be surprised how often you see bar graphs in your daily life. With the incoming election, look closely at advertisements on television or the internet for bar graphs having to do with the candidates! The purpose for this lesson was to clearly demonstrate how to create a bar graph, and show how in various situations they can be used and can be helpful!