Question

Can anybody tell me what is a stem-and-leaf plot and a example

Answer 1

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.

Subjects in a psychological study were timed while completing a certain task. Complete a stem-and-leaf plot for the following list of times:

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.

Answer 2

Stem and Leaf Plots. A Stem and Leaf Plot is a special table where each data value is split into a "stem" (the first digit or digits) and a "leaf" (usually the last digit).

This example has two lists of values. Since the values are similar, I can plot them all on one stem-and-leaf plot by drawing leaves on either side of the stem I will use the tens digits as the stem values, and the ones digits as the leaves. Since "9" (in the Econ 101 list) has no tens digit, the stem value will be "0".

Hope this helped