New GCSE Maths Syllabus - Revision
Maths - Frequency Tables & Frequency Diagrams - The Key Facts!
For your exams you’ll have to be able to draw and understand frequency tables and frequency diagrams. In this blog we will go through all the key information you need understand to do the very best in this topic. This topic is very important in the new GCSE Maths syllabus, so make sure you fully understand everything we go through by taking the multiple choice quiz.
Frequency tables are most often used when there is a lot of data that’s been collected and needs sorting. The main decision that has to be made when drawing out a frequency table is how to group the data, or in other words, what width should be chosen. Let’s go through an example to explain things a little more clearly:
A teacher collects the marks for an assignment which her class of 25 students have just completed. This data is shown below:
|
82 |
39 |
45 |
61 |
55 |
|
67 |
67 |
58 |
36 |
85 |
|
59 |
80 |
46 |
79 |
80 |
|
55 |
40 |
66 |
48 |
69 |
|
66 |
77 |
64 |
70 |
75 |
First we choose a width for grouping our data. Looking at our data above it can be seen that groups of 10 would work well.
|
MARKS |
FREQUENCY |
|
31 - 40 |
3 |
|
41 - 50 |
3 |
|
51 - 60 |
4 |
|
61 - 70 |
8 |
|
71 - 80 |
5 |
|
81 - 90 |
2 |
The easiest way to find the frequency of each group is by tallying up each piece of data into each group it fits into.
Now we have our frequency table our data is presented in a much clearer way. From this we can now draw a frequency diagram.
The x-axis will be each of the groups, with the first being 31 - 40, and the last being 81 - 90. The y-axis is the number of students who achieved a mark in that group. There will be six points to plot on the graph as there are six groups. Once each of these is plotted, all we need to do is join up the dots!
If you haven’t had a listen to our song on frequency tables and frequency diagrams, go and have a listen! It will help you memorise what we’ve gone through here and will further prepare you for your Maths exams.
Responsive, lightweight, fast, synchronized with CSS animations, fully customizable modal window plugin with declarative configuration and hash tracking.
