When you want to find out something, like everyone's favorite pet, you can do a survey. A survey means asking the same question to lots of people and writing down what they say. A tally chart is a fast way to count the answers. Instead of writing numbers, you draw a short line for each answer. Every fifth line crosses the first four, so a group of five is easy to spot.
Mia asked her class which fruit they like best. She tallied the votes: apples got four, bananas got three, grapes got two. Each of these totals is called a frequency, the number of times something was counted. Mia wrote her tallies into a frequency table, then drew a pictogram using little fruit pictures, one picture for each vote.
Numbers you count, like how many pets you have, are called discrete data. You always land on a whole number. Numbers you measure, like your height, are called continuous data. They can be any value, even ones in between, like 120 and a half centimeters.
Tally charts, frequency tables, and pictograms all show data from a survey, and a clear bar chart always has a title, labels, and a scale.
What is a tally chart used for?