The don’ts of plotting graphs
In newspapers, blogs, or social media, there are a lot of misleading graphs that make people misunderstand the actual data. We will look at some examples of this in this section and learn how to avoid them.
Manipulating the axis
Imagine that you have three students with three different scores from an exam. Now, you have to plot their scores on a bar chart. There are two ways to do this – the misleading way and the right way:
Figure 4.23 – Chart A (starts from 80) and Chart B (starts from 0)
Looking at Chart A, it will be interpreted that the score of student A is about 10 times higher than students B and C. However, that is not the case. The scores for the students are 96, 81, and 80, respectively. Chart A is misleading because the Y-axis ranges from 80 to 100. The correct Y-axis should range from 0 to 100, as in Chart B. This is simply because the minimum score a student can get is 0, and the maximum...
