Recording Data

Let us take an example of a class which is preparing to go for a picnic. The teacher asked the students to give their choice of fruits out of banana, apple, orange or guava. Uma is asked to prepare the list. She prepared a list of all the children and wrote the choice of fruit against each name. This list would help the teacher to distribute fruits according to the choice.

You're now the teacher with a list of 50 students, and each student has chosen their favourite fruit: bananas, apples, guavas, or oranges. Your task is to figure out how many of each fruit you'll need for the class party.

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Here's how you can do it:

1. Start with bananas. Go through the list and count each student who chose bananas. Write your total here: bananas needed.

2. Next, count the students who chose apples. How many did you find? apples needed.

3. Now, it's time for guavas. Count carefully and note the number: guavas needed.

4. Lastly, tally up the oranges. What's the total? oranges needed.

So, Uma writes only the names of these fruits one by one like, banana, apple, guava, orange, apple, banana, orange, guava, banana, banana, apple, banana, apple, banana, orange, guava, apple, banana, guava, banana.

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Do you think this makes the teacher’s work easier?NoYes.

She still has to count the fruits in the list one by one as she did earlier.

Salma has another idea. She makes four squares on the floor. Every square is kept for fruit of one kind only. She asks the students to put one pebble in the square which matches their choices. i.e. a student opting for banana will put a pebble in the square marked for banana and so on.

By counting the pebbles in each square, Salma can quickly tell the number of each kind of fruit required. She can get the required information quickly by systematically placing the pebbles in different squares.