In our daily life, we come across many situations where we have to deal with a lot of information. This information, collected for reference or analysis, is called Data.
For example, marks obtained by students in a test, number of wickets taken by bowlers in cricket, or daily temperatures of a city.
To make sense of this information, we need to organize it in a proper way. This process is known as Data Handling.
If 50 students in a class have scored different marks, we cannot understand much by just looking at all numbers. But if we arrange them in a table or show them in a bar graph, it becomes easier to compare.
Example: The marks of 10 students are \( 12, 18, 20, 15, 18, 10, 20, 14, 16, 20 \).
We can organize this data in a frequency table:
| Marks | Frequency |
|---|---|
| 10 | 1 |
| 12 | 1 |
| 14 | 1 |
| 15 | 1 |
| 16 | 1 |
| 18 | 2 |
| 20 | 3 |
Now, let’s represent the same data using a Bar Graph:
The bar graph makes it clear that the marks 20 occur most often.