Question

On 16^th June, 2020 the health minister of the Republic of South Africa gave an update of the number of positive COVID-19 cases. The break-down were as follows:

Province	Positive Cases
Gauteng	12 193
Western Cape	44 143
Kwa Zulu Natal	3 959
Free State	512
North West	1 177
Northern Cape	205
Eastern Cape	345
Limpopo	362
Mpumalanga	322

1. Is it theoretically sound to represent the above information with histograms? Why?
2. Present the information in the most appropriate graph.

Answer 1

Question (a)

Hostogram can be used for quantiative data and not for categorical data

In a histogram you need to have class intervals so that you can have frequency for each class basing on the lower limit and the upper limit of the class

Here if we try to draw a histogram, the provinces can't be represented on x-axis becuase it a cateogorical data and we can;t divide that into class intervals or bins to find the frequency for each class interval or bin

In short you can't represent the Provinces names on the x-axis, you need some quantitative data on the x-axis in histogram

So histogram can not be used here to represent the data since the provinces is a cateogorical data

Question (b)

bar graph or column chart in precise is the appropriate way to chart the data