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Geometry for Kids6 chapters | 45 lessons
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Nola has taught elementary school and tutored for four years. She has a bachelor's degree in Elementary Education, a master's degree in Marketing, and is a certified teacher.
Say you were given a special project to analyze the data from last week's track meet and you are really excited to share the findings with your class. However, when you start looking through the data, you are overwhelmed by the numbers and wonder how you can make it more visually appealing. Then, you remember that your math teacher just taught you about frequency polygons, so you decide that is a great way to organize the track meet data.
A frequency polygon is a type of line graph that shows the frequency of a mutually exclusive event occurring. Seeing the data in this format helps us visualize and understand it better. All frequency polygons must have a title, x-axis, y-axis, and data points with a line connecting them.
The x-axis shows each of the mutually exclusive results from the data. The y-axis is a scale that shows the frequency of that result in the data. The data points are dots on the graph that align each mutually exclusive result with the frequency of its occurrence. Then, a line is drawn to connect all of the data points, and the two end points must lie on the x-axis.
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Let's look at the data for the specific track meet events to help us better understand.
Your favorite sport is the long jump, so you decide to start your project with this event. You flip to the page of long jump statistics and find the following information:
16ft 15ft 16ft 16ft 14ft 12ft 15ft
15ft 14ft 15ft 16ft 12ft 14ft 16ft
16ft 15ft 14ft 12ft 13ft 15ft 16ft
The first thing you notice is that all of the jumps are between 12 and 16 feet, so you choose to use the numbers 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 as the mutually exclusive results on the x-axis. The next thing you do is count how many times each result occurred in the data and you find the following:
12ft -- 3
13ft -- 1
14ft -- 4
15ft -- 6
16ft -- 7
The range of frequencies is 1-7, so your scale on the y-axis needs to have this range. You plot the data points and draw a line that connects them and that begins and ends on the x-axis. Now, you can clearly see that most of the jumps were 16 feet and only one jump was 13 feet. You are feeling really confident and are ready to graph the next track meet event.
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The next page lists the times for the 100-meter dash. There were 14 runners in all, and their finish times are as follows:
10 sec. 12 sec. 13 sec. 11 sec. 12 sec. 13 sec. 11 sec.
12 sec. 11 sec. 13 sec. 12 sec. 11 sec. 12 sec. 12 sec.
You notice that all of the times are between 10 and 13 seconds, so you decide to use the numbers 10, 11, 12, and 13 as the mutually exclusive results on the x-axis. The next step is to count how many times each result occurred in the data:
10 sec. -- 1
11 sec. -- 4
12 sec. -- 6
13 sec. -- 3
The range of frequencies is 1-6, so your scale on the y-axis needs to have this range. You plot the data points and draw a line connecting them that begins and ends on the x-axis. The frequency polygon allows you to see that most of the runners ran the 100-meter dash in 12 seconds and only one runner ran it in 10 sec.
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We learned that a frequency polygon is a line-based graphical representation of the frequency of an event occurring in a data set. All frequency polygons have a title, x-axis, y-axis, and data points with a line connecting them.
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Geometry for Kids6 chapters | 45 lessons
{{courseNav.course.topics.length}} chapters | {{courseNav.course.mDynamicIntFields.lessonCount}} lessons | {{course.flashcardSetCount}} flashcard set{{course.flashcardSetCoun > 1 ? 's' : ''}}