When collecting data from real-world problems, it is always best to represent the data in a pie chart.?

2 Answers

• False.

  Suppose that you wanted to graph a patient's daily temperature. A line graph or a bar graph might work, but how would you represent that on a pie chart.

  How could you use a pie chart to graph the exponential, logarithmic, linear, or quadratic growth of anything sampled daily, monthly, by the minute, etc. Here linear or exponential or logarithmic graph paper with either lines or (distant second choice) bars would be better.

  How about the distance from the center of a target to each of many shots fired at it. Here you would want to use a scatter diagram.

  Needless to say, I could keep on coming up with more examples, but there's no point to it. What I have done is given you a sample of a few cases where pie charts wouldn't work at all.

  Of course if you want to split up a budget between some number of different projects a pie chart is just the right thing.

  Different charts for different data. 🙂

• False. Graph choice depends on the data being collected. If it is proportions, then a pie chart is OK, but if you are measuring the correlation between a dependent and independent variable, then you would use a line graph