You now know the parts of a chart and how to read it. But how can a chart help you make a decision? Charts allow you to gather information and organize it in a way that allows you to compare choices. In this activity, you will practise analyzing charts.

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Let's look at how a chart can help you choose an apartment. We have found three advertisements in a local paper that have the following information.

This is a lot of information to read and understand! An easy way to compare the three places is to put them in a chart.

Let's use rent, utilities, size, and total cost for our headings.

Let's use Apartment A, Apartment B, and Apartment C for row titles.

The information for Apartment A is entered like this:

The information for Apartment B is entered like this:

Finally, the information for Apartment C is entered like this:

Now you have a chart that will let you compare information without having to look at a whole bunch of different pieces of paper.

  Self-check!