Graphs are a part of life. They don't disappear when math ends. They are on the television news, in newspapers, in magazines; they are everywhere. They report on everything from how many vehicles are in a particular city to the price of gas to how one team does against another.

Here is another example of a graph.

Try This:

Find an example of a graph in a newspaper, a magazine, or a book.


Describe what information the graph is explaining.

It is an important skill to be able to read graphs and understand what they are trying to communicate.

A graph that appears a lot in the media is a graph comparing the value of the Canadian dollar compared to the value of the American dollar. An example of this graph is below. It shows the value of the Canadian dollar in American dollars for 30 days ending October 11, 2015.

Notice that even though the value of the Canadian dollar goes up and down across the graph, a logical conclusion is that after September 28, the value of the Canadian dollar is increasing compared to the American dollar.

Another type of graph you may look at may be a census graph that tells you about the population of an area (or the population change in an area).

A census is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. (The last census taken in Canada was in 2011.)

Click here to see the population of Alberta change from 1921 to 2014. The numbers across the bottom of the graph are the percentage of the population. The numbers on the left-hand side of the graph are the ages of the people.

If you look at how the graph ends, the largest areas on either side of the graph occurs first at age 55 (the baby boomer generation) and at age 30 (the echo generation, the children of the baby boomers.) That means that in 2014, the majority of people in Alberta were around 30 years old.

Because the graph gets smaller at the lower ages, one conclusion that you could make about the population of Alberta is that it is getting older.