Understanding picture and bar graphs

- What do you see here
are two different ways

of looking at the same information.

So, for example, if I were to ask you,

and you could look at either
this graph on the left

or this graph on the right,

what type of squirrel do they find

the most of at the park?

What would your answer be?

Well, the way that you
would try to answer that,

let's say you were to look
at this graph on the left,

which is a picture graph.

You might say, "Where
does that name come from?"

Well, it's using pictures.

And these pictures usually
are some type of symbol,

or in this case, an actual
picture of a squirrel

that shows you the things
that we're counting.

Now, before you even just
count the picture graph,

the pictures in the picture graph,

it's important to look at the key here

and make sure that you know
what each squirrel picture.

They almost look like cats here.

What each of these squirrel
pictures represent here,

each squirrel represents one squirrel,

so it's pretty straightforward,

but it could have been two
squirrels or three squirrels,

or four and a half squirrels,

which would've been very strange,

but it's one squirrel.

So if you wanted to know
which one has the most,

and I guess it would've been the most,

regardless of what this key said,

even if it was two squirrels,

you can see just by looking at it

that you see the most gray squirrels here.

There's the most number of
these little squirrel pictures.

We can actually know exactly

how many gray squirrels there are.

There are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

of these pictures.

Each of them represent one squirrel,

so there are eight gray squirrels.

Now, we could have also used
this graph at the right,

and this is called a bar graph.

Why?

Because you have these
bars to show how much

of each type of squirrel you have,

and so we can make sure we can confirm

that the gray squirrels right over here.

This is also showing that you have eight,

and with a bar graph, this
one has it nicely numbered,

where we see that each
line increases by one.

We go from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Sometimes it's not labeled as neatly,

and sometimes each of these vertical lines

might represent two or three or four.

So it's always good to make sure,

but this one's pretty straightforward.

So we can see here there
are eight gray squirrels.

Now these can also be useful
for making comparisons.

So, for example, if I were to say

how many more fox squirrels were found

at the park than red squirrels?

Well, you could look at either of these.

Let's start with the bar graph here.

We could see the red squirrels.

There's five.

The fox squirrels has six,

so there's one more.

There's one more fox
squirrel than red squirrel.

You can see that here.

The red squirrel fives, fox squirrel.

The red (chuckles)

There are five red squirrels,

and then you can see there
are six fox squirrels.

You could think of this one
as the one that goes above

and beyond the number of
red squirrels we have.

So both picture and bar graphs

can be good ways of thinking

of the quantities.

You see, they're good
for making comparisons.

They're good for figuring
out just how many

of something you see or
what's the difference,

or even the total of different categories.

Here, it's the squirrel types.

Now, it's also important to realize

what this is not going to tell you.

This isn't necessarily going

to even tell you the
color of the squirrels.

You might say, "Oh
look, this picture graph

looks like this squirrel.

Is this gray/blue color?"

No, you can't just assume

how it's drawn is actually what it is.

It's just a symbol.

For example, I'm guessing
that a red squirrel

is more reddish, and a gray squirrel,

and maybe a gray squirrel is more grayish.

But this doesn't tell
you what they look like.

This doesn't tell you how hard
it was to collect the data.

You don't know how long it took.

You don't know anything else

about the squirrel's behavior,

what they might eat, et cetera.

You just know how many of each type

of squirrel was found at the park.