The
following examples provide some practice with stem-and-leaf plots, as
well as explaining some details of formatting, and showing how to create
a "key" for your plot.
<span>
Subjects
in a psychological study were timed while completing a certain task.
Complete a stem-and-leaf plot for the following list of times:
</span>
7.6, 8.1, 9.2, 6.8, 5.9, 6.2, 6.1, 5.8, 7.3, 8.1, 8.8, 7.4, 7.7, 8.2
The first thing I'll do is reorder this list. It isn't required, but it surely makes life easier. My ordered list is:
5.8, 5.9, 6.1, 6.2, 6.8, 7.3, 7.4, 7.6, 7.7, 8.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.8, 9.2
These values have one decimal place,
but the stem-and-leaf plot makes no accomodation for this. The
stem-and-leaf plot only looks at the last digit (for the leaves) and all
the digits before (for the stem). So I'll have to put a "key" or
"legend" on this plot to show what I mean by the numbers in this plot.
The ones digits will be the stem values, and the tenths will be the
leaves.
