ShmoopTube

00:04

Histograms, a la Shmoop. Our world has a lot of different kinds of

00:11

grams.

00:12

In the old days. . .

00:13

. . .we had telegrams deliver our news.

00:16

Now we shoot off an Instagram. We use sonograms. . .

00:19

. . .to see how our babies are doing. . .

00:21

. . .and electrocardiograms. . .

00:22

. . .to see how our tickers are doing.

00:25

And we sure wouldn't want to forget about this gram.

00:28

But none of them showcase data. . .

00:30

. . .as well as one of these bad boys. A histogram is kind of like a bar graph. . .

00:34

. . . without the space in between the columns. The main difference. . .

00:37

. . .is that bar graphs work better to chart individual data. . .

00:40

. . .while histograms do the job if you're charting a range of info.

00:45

Say you wanted to plot the times of bobsledders in the last Olympics.

00:48

You'd have a lot of dots on that line. . .

00:50

. . .if you had to plot every single time recorded by a hundred different sledders.

00:54

That's the beauty of a histogram. It lets you gather a group of data. . .

01:01

. . .like all the sleds between one minute thirty seconds and one minute thirty-two seconds.

01:07

. .

01:07

. . .and display them all together. A lot easier to read. . .

01:10

. . .plus, the data looks like a really cool skyline.

01:13

Just try and have this gram do that. Yeah. We thought so.

Full Transcript