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Picture graphs (pictographs) review

Picture graphs are a fun way to display data. This article reviews how to create and read picture graphs (also called pictographs).
A picture graph (or pictograph) is similar to a bar graph but way more fun. Here's one that shows how many sheep each shepherd has:
A picture graph where the y axis is labeled number of sheep and the x axis is labeled yuki, cam, justin, and kim. A picture of a sheep equals one sheep. There are four sheep above Yuki. There are two sheep above Cam. There are three sheep above Justing. There are five sheep above Kim.
This works well when we're dealing with small numbers, but what if shepherds had many more sheep?
We could make each sheep picture represent more than one sheep, like this:
A picture graph where the y axis is labeled number of sheep and the x axis is labeled Diane, Girish, and Willy. A picture of a sheep equals five sheep. There are four pictures of sheep above Diane. There are five pictures of sheep above Girish. There is one picture of Willy.
In this picture graph, Diane has 4×5=20 sheep, Girish has 5×5=25 sheep, and Willy has just 5 sheep.
Want to learn more about pictographs? Check out this video.

Practice

Problem 1
Some students collected ladybugs.
StudentNumber of bugs
Jen4
Lee6
Sara5
Create a picture graph of this data.
A ladybug equals one ladybug.

Want more practice like this? Check out this exercise and this more advanced exercise.

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