Bad Graphs Ans Satistics

Professor Anderson

Math 130

29 September 2014

Statistics is used to collect, organize, and summarize data. Many people take the advantage of statistics and shoe there data in a way that is misleading to the audience, but it’s intended to help them. The illustration that I picked is one about if George W. Bush Tax cuts expire. I wanted to do it because I love politics and I wanted to talk about something in my interest. The ones who wanted to show this to the audience were smart in representing their info so that they can make Bush look bad.

The main problem with the illustration is that the ones who wanted to represent it to the public used the Y-axis trick so that the increase in taxes looks huge, even if it’s a small percentage. The way they did their graph is right, but how they did the y-axis is what made the difference in making people believe that there was a big change. There was only a 4.6% change in taxes, but they statisticians who represented this made it look like that there would be a huge increase. When someone looks at the graph, they think that there will be a huge change, when it will be only 4.6% The now bar is so small compared to the January bar, which makes people think that there will be a huge change, when it is not. There shouldn’t be that much of a difference in the height of the bars.

In order to correct the error that the people who did this graph did, you have to make a new graph with a good y-axis margin. A correct use of these statistics would look like two bars that are relatively close in height. This graph shows that there is like a 300% change, if Bush tax cuts expires, but there wouldn’t be much of a difference. The corrected version would be one with two bars that look really close in height and don’t show that much of a difference. It would show the viewer that there wouldn’t be much difference if Bush tax cuts expire or not.

The intention of the one who created this graph is to tell people that there would be a...