World Motor Vehicle Production: Bar Graphs and Pie Charts

Transcription

1 activity 1.1 World Motor Vehicle Production: Bar Graphs and Pie Charts In this activity, you will investigate data and create several different types of graphs to help understand patterns in world motor vehicle production. You will investigate when each type of graph is appropriate for the data. Consider the following data on leading world producers of passenger cars and trucks in 2002 (Source: The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2004, page 319). Location Cars (in thousands) Trucks (in thousands) United States 5,027 7,301 France 3, Germany 5, Japan 8,619 1,621 South Korea 2, Spain 2, Other 15,115 6,784

2 380 Excel Activities 1. If you were to create a graph or chart of this data set, what would you like it to show? 2. Explain why a bar graph is appropriate for the car production data. 3. Draw axes in the space provided and create a bar graph for the car production data. Be sure to label the axes and show the scales you are using. 4. Explain what your bar graph shows that the original data table did not show and what the original table contains that your graph does not retain. 5. If you create a pie chart for the car production data, what will each piece of the pie show?

3 Activity 1.1: World Motor Vehicle Production Use the Excel instructions that follow to help you fill in the third column of the next table to show the percentage of the total car production that falls into each row of the table: Location Cars Percentage Approximate Fraction (in thousands) of the Whole United States 5,027 France 3,284 Germany 5,122 Japan 8,619 South Korea 2,651 Spain 2,267 Other 15,115 Total Instructions to Use Excel to Calculate Percentages a. b. Enter the car production data into columns A and B of an Excel worksheet. Use column A for locations and B for the number of cars produced, and use row 1 for titles. (A portion of the table follows.) Use the arrows, or press Enter after you type the entry in each cell, and fill in the numbers in cells B2 (column B, row 2) through B8. To adjust the column width of column A to fit all the descriptions, use the mouse (or touchpad) to move the cursor to the letter A at the top of

4 382 Excel Activities column A and click. This will highlight the first column. Then position the cursor at the right border of the column where the cursor changes to a black plus sign with left and right arrows and double-click the left mouse button. Repeat with column B, if needed. A B 1 Location Cars (in thousands) 2 U.S. 5,027 3 France 3,284 4 Germany 5,122 c. d. e. f. To get the total car production, position the cursor in cell B9. To instruct Excel to perform a computation, you must use the equals sign. Type =sum(b2:b8) and then press Enter. To calculate what percentage each value in the table is of the whole, divide each number by the total, and then ask Excel to convert to a percentage. You can tell the computer to do this with the first entry in column B and then drag down using the mouse to the percentages for each row. Put the cursor in cell C2 and type =B2 / (the number you got for the total car production in cell B9; do not write the sum with a comma ). To convert this decimal value to a percentage, put the cursor in cell C2, and on the Home tab (on the Ribbon), in the Cells group, click Format. On the drop down menu, choose Format cells, and on the Number tab, click Percentage. In the Decimal places box, type 0, because you just need a general idea of the percentage of the total for each country. Click OK. Now to fill in the percentages in the rest of the column, put the cursor in cell C2 and move the cursor to the lower-right corner of the cell, until it changes to a black plus sign. Press and hold the left mouse button and drag down to row 8. The rest of the percentages should fill in as you drag down.

5 Activity 1.1: World Motor Vehicle Production Use the next Excel instructions to get a rough approximate fraction of the whole represented by each row of the table and insert those values in the final column of the table shown previously. (This will help you create a pie chart.) Instructions to Use Excel to Convert Percentages into a Fraction a. b. Put the cursor in cell D2. Type =C2 and then press Enter. Click cell D2 and go to Format, then select Format Cells and on the Number tab, click Fraction. In the Type box, choose As sixteenths (8/16), and press OK. This will give you the numbers as fractions with the denominator 16. You may use other forms, but for drawing the portions of the pie chart, it is easier to use denominators that are powers of 2. Now fill in the rest of the column by using the drag function of Excel (see Step d in the previous section, Instructions to Use Excel to Calculate Percentages ). 8. Create a pie chart for the car production data using the last column of the table to help you determine approximately how big each piece of the circle should be. Be sure to label your chart.

6 384 Excel Activities 9. Use the data given at the beginning of this activity to create a bar graph showing truck production in 2002 and explain what the graph shows. 10. For what types of data is a bar graph appropriate and for what types of data is a pie chart appropriate? Additional Questions 1. The following table shows data on new passenger cars imported into the U.S. by country of origin in 1992 and in 2002 (Source: The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2004, page 320): Country Japan 1,598,919 2,046,902 Germany 205, ,455 Italy 1,791 3,504 United Kingdom 10, ,633 Sweden 76,832 87,709

7 Activity 1.1: World Motor Vehicle Production 385 Country France South Korea 130, ,881 Mexico 266, ,181 Canada 1,119,223 1,882,660 Total 1 3,447,200 6,477,659 1 Note that the total includes countries that are not listed separately. a. What kinds of information, related to these data, would you want to get from a graph? b. Would both bar graphs and pie charts be appropriate for presenting these data? Would one be preferable? c. Create two graphs (bar and/or pie) to present these data, and explain what each graph shows specifically about these data.

8 386 Excel Activities 2. The following data give the most popular colors for the 2002 model year for full/intermediate size cars (Source: The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2004, page 322): Color Percent Silver 28.1 White 11.8 Light brown 11.6 Black 11.2 Medium/dark red 10.2 Medium/dark blue 9.5 Medium/dark gray 6.2 Medium/dark green 5.3 Gold 3.4 Other 2.7 a. Create a pie chart for these data or explain why it is not appropriate to do so. Explain how you determined the size of each pie piece.

9 Activity 1.1: World Motor Vehicle Production 387 b. Create a bar graph for these data or explain why it is not appropriate to do so. Summary In this activity, you learned how to use Excel to find percentages. You gained experience in deciding when a bar graph or a pie chart is appropriate to represent data and in creating bar graphs and pie charts. You also practiced how to read and explain information from bar graphs and pie charts.