Question

Birth months Imagine asking a random sample of 60 students from your school about their birth months. Draw a plausible (believable) graph of the distribution of birth months. Should you use a bar graph or a histogram to display the data?

Short answer

Birth months Imagine asking a random sample of 60 students from your school about their birth months

Step-by-step solution

Given information.  

Birth months Imagine asking a random sample of 60 students from your school about their birth months

you use a bar graph or a histogram to display the data.

Because the months are categorical, you should use a bar graph (histogram requires that the variable is numerical).

The width and height of the bars must be proportional to the number of students.

We expect the 60 students in the sample to be evenly distributed across all months, so there should be approximately 60/12=5 students per month.

Let the frequencies of the number of students born in the corresponding month be, for example:

Birth	Frequency
January	5
February	6
March	5
April	4
May	5
June	5
July	5
August	4
September	5
October	5
November	6
December	5

The corresponding bar graph is then displayed.