Topics
13. Data
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Australia
Year 6

13.01 Types of data

Lesson
Practice
Lesson

Are you ready?

Think about the responses you could get if you asked the following questions:

How old are you?What month were you born in?
How many pets do you have?What animals do you have as pets?
How long does it take you to get to school each day?Do you travel by car to school each day?

Is there a difference in the type of answer you would get to the questions on the left from the ones on the right?

Idea summary

The answers to some questions are numbers and other questions have answers that are words.

Categorical data

This video explores categorical data.

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Examples

Example 1

All the students in your school take a survey with the four questions below.

Which of the following questions will have categorical data as their results?

A
How many pets do you own?
B
Where was your most recent holiday?
C
How many people live in your house?
D
How tall are you?
Worked Solution
Create a strategy

Choose a question with a word answer not a number.

Apply the idea

Of all the questions, only option B has a word answer. The other questions require number answers.

Idea summary

Categorical data means we ask questions that have words (or numbers that can't be used to perform mathematical operations) as their answers.

Numerical data

This video explores numerical data.

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Examples

Example 2

Which of the following are numerical data?

A
Genres of book
B
Type of fruits
C
Amount owing on layby
D
Brand of phones
Worked Solution
Create a strategy

Choose the option that describes a number.

Apply the idea

Option C which refers to an amount of money that can be measured using a number.

So, the numerical data is option C.

Idea summary

If we ask questions where the answers are numbers, and we can perform mathematical operations on them, this is numerical data.

Outcomes

AC9M6ST01

interpret and compare data sets for ordinal and nominal categorical, discrete and continuous numerical variables using comparative displays or visualisations and digital tools; compare distributions in terms of mode, range and shape

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