Question

Easy reading? Here are data on the lengths of the first 25 words on a randomly selected page from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon:

Part (a). Make a dotplot of these data.

Part (b). Long words can make a book hard to read. What percentage of words in the sample have 8 or more letters?

Short answer

Part (a)

Part (b) 16%

Step-by-step solution

Part (a) Step 1. Given information.

Here are data on the lengths of the first 25 words from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon:

Part (a) Step 2. Create a number line.

Put a dot above the corresponding number on the number line for each given data value.

Part (b) Step 1. The sample words have 8 or more letters.

We can see in the dotplot that there are two dots at eight, one at ten, and one at thus there are four dots that correspond to at least eight letters.

Furthermore, we can see that there are 25 dots in total in the dotplot, implying that 4 of the 25 words in the study contained 8 or more letters.

$$\begin{gathered} \frac{4}{25}=0.16 \\ 0.16=16\% \end{gathered}$$

As a result, 16% of the words in the sample have 8 or more letters.