A slightly more sophisticated version of a pictogram is called a bar chart. It is quicker and easier to draw as you don’t have to draw lots of pictures.

Let’s try drawing one for the same data about student absences:

Day	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Number Absent	2	3	5	1	7

The bars can go horizontally or vertically – vertical bars are the most common. Instead of a key we normally use an axis, with categories or a scale. There should be a gap between each two bars.

Exercise

Answers

1.) (a) Green – tallest bar (b) Purple – shortest bar (c) Blue & red (d) 33 (e) Green, Blue, Red, Yellow, Pink, Orange, Purple (f) Blue: 6, Pink: 4, Green: 7, Orange: 3, Red: 6, Purle: 2, Yellow: 5.

(2.) Science

(3.) (a) 3, (b) 3, (c) Wednesday

(5.) Sports Special

Large numbers of data

Bar charts make it easy to represent large numbers of data. We just use a suitable scale.

Worked Example

The below table shows how a selection of students come to school each day. Draw a bar chart to represent this information:

Means of transport	No. of students
Bus	70
Car	40
Bicycle	20
Walk	80

Exercise

N.B. In question 3, where it asks for a a “bar-line graph”, we will just draw a normal bar chart (so our answer may look a little different to the answer given below and that’s ok).

Answers

1.) One step represents 20 mothers

2.) (a) 2 students

3.) (b) Football

4.) (a) 10 (b) 15, (c) 95, (d) $9.50