Pie charts

Once you have collected your raw data, you need to represent it in a diagram. Two ways of doing this are to use a
pie chart or frequency diagram.

Pie charts and frequency diagrams

In a survey, 100 school students were asked to name their favourite soap. The results are shown in a pie chart and a
frequency diagram below.

In another school, Emmerdale was the most popular soap:

Remember: the larger the number, the larger the angle

in the pie chart.
Drawing a pie chart

Look at this record of traffic travelling down a particular road.

Traffic Survey 31 January 2008

Type of vehicle Number of vehicles

Cars 140

Motorbikes 70

Vans 55

Buses 5

1 Matthias Mansueto Maths Notes

 Type of vehicle Number of vehicles

Total vehicles 270

To draw a pie chart, we need to represent each part of the data as a proportion of 360, because there are 360 degrees in a
circle.

For example, if 55 out of 270 vehicles are vans, we will represent this on the circle as a segment with an angle of: ( 55/270) x 360
= 73 degrees.

This will give the following results:

Traffic Survey 31 January 2008

Type of vehicle Number of Calculation Degrees of a circle

vehicles

Cars 140 (140/270) x 360 = 187

Motorbikes 70 (70/270) x 360 = 93

Vans 55 (55/270) x 360 = 73

Buses 5 (5/270) x 360 =7

This data is represented on the pie chart below.

Question
Ninety people were asked which newspaper they read.

45 read the Daily Bugle.

20 read England Today.

15 read another paper.

10 do not read a paper.

Calculate the number of degrees required to represent each answer in a pie chart.

Answer

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 Newspaper Number of people Angle degrees

The Daily Bugle 45 (45/90) x 360 = 180

England Today 20 (20/90) x 360 = 80

Other 15 (15/90) x 360 = 60

I do not read a 10 (10/90) x 360 = 40

paper

Before you draw the pie chart, remember to check that the angles which you have calculated add up to 360
degrees.

Drawing a frequency diagram for grouped data

Here is the data for the ages of customers shopping in the Bitesize CD store.

Bitesize CD store 16th May 2008

Ages of customers in 1-hour 25, 29, 45, 19, 36, 17, 60, 51, 39, 24, 15, 13, 31, 18, 24, 32, 37, 27, 23, 53, 41, 34, 29, 28, 52, 17, 55, 47, 34, 28, 22, 20, 64, 39,
period 38, 33, 24, 16, 27, 19, 26, 27, 25, 32, 26, 48, 54, 35

We could show this data in a bar chart, but it would have a lot of bars! As ages are continuous data, we can group them
together so that we have fewer categories.

This is the same set of data put into groups:

Age Number of people

14-20 9

21-30 16

31-40 12

41-50 4

51-60 6

61+ 1

We can now put the data into a pie chart or frequency diagram.

When choosing intervals for the data sets make sure that they do not overlap and that they include all the data.

For example you could use the following intervals to draw a frequency diagram:

 0 - 20

 21 - 30

 31 - 40

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 Interpreting pie charts and frequency diagrams

Example
The pie chart below shows the heights (in cm) of 30 pupils in a class.

The biggest slice of the pie chart contains the most people - 151-160cm.

Question
How many pupils are between 121-130cm tall?

Answer
The angle of this section is 36 degrees. The question says there are 30 pupils in the class. So the number of pupils of
height 121 - 130 cm is:

/360 x 30 = 3
36

Example
A survey was conducted to determine the number of people in cars during rush hour. The results are shown in the frequency
diagram below.

Question
What is total number of cars in the survey?

Answer
6 + 3 + 5 + 1 = 15

There are 6 cars with one person in, 3 cars with two people, 5 cars with three people, and 1 car with four people.

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 Question
What is the most likely number of people in a car?

Answer
1.

Cars in the survey are most likely to have 1 person in them as this is the tallest bar - 6 of the cars in the survey had one
occupant.

5 Matthias Mansueto Maths Notes