Excel Assignment Gerardo Lemus Human/Nature Dr. Becky Boesch November 24, 2013 A.

Graph One- 2010 Racial Percentage The graph that I chose to represent the racial make up of the United States was a pie graph, and the reason is because I wanted to show the races and their percentages with in the whole population. The pie graph shows the percentage/amount that each race takes up in the whole pie/population. The insight that this graph shows is that more than 70% of the population is white and that the other races make up a small percentage compared to this number, specially Native Hawaiians and Pacific islander which only make up .2% of the whole population, not even 1%. An interesting thing that can be seen from this pie graph is that the other part of the population is the third largest piece in the pie, larger than Asian, Two or more races, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific islander. Graph Two-Population make up by race For the second graph that needed to compare the amount of people classifying themselves by different races was best shown by a bar graph. The bar graph was the best choice because I needed to compare numbers and the best way to see the difference in numbers is by putting them in visual form/bars side by side. The thing that this graph shows about the way this country classifies races is that they group groups together, for example Native Hawaiians and pacific islander are in the same category, and when they dont fit any of these categories they are

considered other. The thing that catches ones attention in this graph is that the second largest racial population doesnt come any where near the largest, one is merely 38 million while the other is 223 million. Graph three-Change of race population over time The third and final graph needed to show change of racial population make up over time, and in order to do this I created a line graph because it does just that by having time in the x axis and having the population in the y axis. And to compare the different races to one another I just added a line for each race. The thing that this graph tells about the racial classification in this country is that it wasnt always the same, before the 1950 some racial categories didnt exist. The interesting thing that the graph tells us, besides the categories that didnt exist before, is that even though every category has been growing over time some have been growing at a faster rate, and this is seen because of the difference in slopes in the lines. B. The thing that I found problematic with dealing with the categories that the census provided is the fact that even though Latino/Hispanic isnt considered a race it was still included in the data that we had to extract information from, and that even the categories we use today werent always present as show in graph three. The fact that race isnt a biological trait show that, like Zerubabel suggested, we humans like to categorize everything in order to cope with all the information that is around us. I think that this information that the census provides shows how we humans tend to over-complicate things in order to make sense out of it. We draw lines based on ethnicity, but not all ethnicities are included so we add an other option and for those people who have more than one ethnic background can choose a different- two or more racesoption so you dont have to choose between being classified as Asian or some other race.

Another thing that over complicates things is the fact that we group groups together, because for some reason Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are related just because they are from the same area on a map. So in conclusion we draw a lot of lines for a lot of reasons just because we as humans like, and need to categorize things in order to not get overwhelmed and make sense out of all the information that we are exposed to.