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Have you ever wondered how maps are made? Or perhaps who first thought of the idea of designing maps? We're here to answer these questions for you.
Age 14 to 18
Challenge Level
Where do people fly to from London?
We collected data on the number of planes that flew to each continent from London airports in 2017.
Here are four representations of this data:
Figure 1
Figure 2: Popularity of destinations (by continent) in 2017
Figure 3: Destinations of flights from London in 2017
Figure 4: Number of flights from London airports in 2017
- What information can you deduce from each representation?
- What is good about each representation (including its caption)?
- What is bad about each representation?
- Who might create each of these representations and for what purpose?
- Could you create a better representation?
To see the original data used to create these representations, click on "Show".
| Continent | Total flights | Proportion |
|---|---|---|
| Europe | 374496 | 67.8% |
| Domestic | 57866 | 10.5% |
| Asia | 52336 | 9.5% |
| North America | 52259 | 9.5% |
| Africa | 11925 | 2.2% |
| South America | 2059 | 0.4% |
| Oceania | 1442 | 0.3% |
- Is there anything you might ask about this data?
To find out how this data was collected, take a look at the article Challenging Data Tasks: The Making of "Where Are You Flying?"
This resource is part of the collection Statistics - Maths of Real Life
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NRICH is part of the family of activities in the Millennium Mathematics Project.
NRICH is part of the family of activities in the Millennium Mathematics Project.