If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

Main content

Picture graphs

A picture graph, or pictograph, is a graph used to display information that uses images or symbols to represent data. For example, a picture graph displaying ​the amount of points scored by 5 basketball players could use the image of a basketball to represent 2 points and then display a basketball over each player's name for every 2 points she scored.

Want to join the conversation?

Video transcript

- [Voiceover] What we have here is a picture graph, and the reason why it's called a picture graph is because it uses pictures to give us information. In this case, it uses the picture of a mouse and it tells us that one of these little mouse pictures means one mouse, it equals one mouse. So what is this picture graph telling us? Well, the title says "Mice on Farm," so this tells us how many mice are in the different places in a farm, and you can see here the different places where we might find mice. We could find mice in the house, in the barn, in the pasture, or the corral. And then these, I guess you could say these stacks of these mouse pictures tell us how many mice there are in each of those places. So, for example, in the house, we see, well this, this they tell us, that's one mouse, this is one plus one plus one plus one, or four mice. Four mice in the house. That's four right over there, write that over there. Four mice in the house. How many in the barn? Well, same idea, one, two, let me use a different color, one, two, three, four, five, six, so there are six mice, six mice, in the barn. So there's six mice in the barn, let me just write that down. So six mice in the barn, what about the pasture? Well, we see that there's three mice there, that's 'cause each of these pictures is one mouse. The person who made the picture graph could've made each of those pictures a different number of mice, but here each one is one mouse, so there's three in the pasture. Three in the pasture. And then, finally, move over a little bit, and then finally there are two in the corral. Two in the corral. So if someone asked you, "How many total mice are there on this farm?" Well, you would add all of these up. You would say four plus six is 10, plus three is 13, plus 2 is 15. 15 total mice on the farm. So once again, picture graph, just a way to show data, to show information. This tells us how many mice are in each part of the farm. If someone said, "How many mice in the barn?" you say, okay, well, you know, there's six mice. If someone says, "How many mice are "in the pasture and the corral combined?" Well, that's gonna be the three in the pasture plus the two in the corral, or five. They said, "How many mice in the whole farm?" and if these are all the places where the mice could be, well, it's gonna be the four plus six plus three plus two, or 15, and we're done.