Question

Whatever Use the same data from Exercise 7 to construct a Pareto chart. Which graph does a better job of illustrating the data: Pareto chart or pie chart?

Short answer

The following Pareto chart is constructed.

A Pareto chart is better than a pie chart to depict the most annoying phrases as the frequencies for each category can be easily inferred through a Pareto chart.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

Five different phrases, which are considered the most annoying in conversations, along with their frequencies, are given.

Phrases	Frequency
Whatever	219
Like	127
You know	104
Just sayin'	81
Obviously	35

Describe a Pareto Chart

A Pareto chart is a bar chart that depicts the frequencies of each category using vertical bars.

The bars are arranged in the descending order.

Thus, the first bar represents the most frequently occurring category.

Sketch the Pareto chart

The following steps are used to plot the Pareto chart.

• Mark the values from 0, 50, 100, and so on to 250 on the vertical scale.
• Write the five phrases on the horizontal scale, equidistant from one other.
• Draw vertical bars of heights the same as the frequency of each phrase.
• Label the vertical axis as ‘Frequency’.

The following pie chart is constructed.

Compare a pie chart and a Pareto chart

As the bars in a Pareto chart accurately and exactly represent the frequencies of each phrase as compared to the slices in the pie chart, the Pareto chart is a better graph to depict the most annoying phrases in a conversation.

In other words, the information about the frequency of each category is easily readable from the Pareto chart as compared to the pie chart.