Wednesday 12 December 2007

Using graphs - how useful are they? What do you need to include?

Graph 1 - Comment on the shortcomings of the following graphs, and suggest improvements which might be made.

How useful is this graph? What are its main shortcomings?

Graph 1 is not very useful at all. There is no title, no units for the values displayed and no description of what the graph is showing.


Graph 2 again displays no heading, units for values or description. Furthermore, the two sets of data for distance and time have been displayed separately rather than correlated together to produce one line.


In Graph 3 this mistake has been rectified, but the other limitations still exhist and make the graph rather unhelpful. The data could be better represented as follows:




Graph 4 could represent an offroad bike race, which would account for the increase in time to cover the same distance at points on the graph, as the ground may have become more uneven at these points and have taken more time to cover. The data could be displayed as follows:

1 comment:

The Python said...

The first shows 5 km time splits of a marathon runner, the second shows the 1 km time splits of a biker doing a 10 kn hill climb featuring two big hills.