NCERT Book Class 6 Maths Data Handling

Data Handling

9.1 Introduction

You must have observed your teacher recording the attendance of students in your class everyday, or recording marks obtained by you after every test or examination. Similarly, you must have also seen a cricket score board. Two score boards have been illustrated here :  

You know that in a game of cricket the information recorded is not simply about who won and who lost. In the score board, you will also find some equally important information about the game. For instance, you may find out the time taken and number of balls faced by the highest run-scorer. Similarly, in your day to day life, you must have seen several kinds of tables consisting of numbers, figures, names etc.

These tables provide ‘Data’. A data is a collection of numbers gathered to give some information.

9.2 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.

 If the teacher wants to know the number of bananas required for the class, she has to read the names in the list one by one and count the total number of bananas required. To know the number of apples, guavas and oranges seperately she has to repeat the same process for each of these fruits. How tedious and time consuming it is! It might become more tedious if the list has, say, 50 students.

 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. 

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

Try to perform this activity for 40 students and with names of any four fruits. Instead of pebbles you can also use bottle caps or some other token.

9.3 Organisation of Data

To get the same information which Salma got, Ronald needs only a pen and a paper. He does not need pebbles. He also does not ask students to come and place the pebbles. He prepares the following table.

Do you understand Ronald’s table?

What does one (✓) mark indicate?

Four students preferred guava. How many (✓) marks are there against guava?

How many students were there in the class? Find all this information.

Discuss about these methods. Which is the best? Why? Which method is more useful when information from a much larger data is required?

Please refer to attached file for NCERT Class 6 Maths Data Handling