Pupils use box plots to visualise regional incomes and income distribution patterns in various UK cities.
Scenario
You are carrying out a school economics project about regional incomes in the UK to learn about the different annual incomes people can expect to earn depending on where they live. As part of your research, you notice that not only do people living in different cities earn rather different amounts, there are also differences between the cities in how different incomes are “distributed” within each city’s population. You decide to plot some box plots to visualise the income distributions of each of the relevant UK cities and better understand the data.
Curriculum references
| National Curriculum 4 | "Interpret, analyse and compare the distributions of datasets from univariate empirical distributions through: appropriate graphical representation involving discrete, continuous and grouped data, including box plots appropriate measures of central tendency (median, mean, mode and modal class) and spread (range, including consideration of outliers, quartiles and inter-quartile range)." |
| OCR 12.03a | Calculate the mean, mode, median and range for ungrouped data. Find the modal class, and calculate estimates of the range, mean and median for grouped data, and understand why they are estimates. Describe a population using statistics. Make simple comparisons. Compare data sets using ‘like for like’ summary values. Understand the advantages and disadvantages of summary values. Calculate estimates of mean, median, mode, range, quartiles and interquartile range from graphical representation of grouped data Draw and interpret box plots. Use the median and interquartile range to compare distributions. |
| AQA Edexcel S4 | Interpret, analyse and compare the distributions of datasets from univariate empirical distributions through: appropriate graphical representation involving discrete, continuous and grouped data, including box plots appropriate measures of central tendency (median, mean, mode and modal class) and spread (range, including consideration of outliers, quartiles and inter-quartile range). |