How Quantities Combine: Understanding Data
Stacked bar charts
Read stacked bar charts, and choose the right chart for a comparison.
Table 10.2 gives three families' spending on six categories. A cluster-column chart puts bars side by side, grouped either:
- by category: good for comparing families within one category;
- by family: good for comparing a family's own categories.
To compare totals, stack the bars. A stacked bar chart joins each family's pieces end to end: the whole bar is the family's total, split into its parts.
From the table: totals are ₹8425 (A), ₹7286 (B) and ₹7040 (C). Family C spent the least overall, and 950/7040 ≈ 13.5% of it on housing.
Easy totals, harder parts. Apart from the first piece, segments don't start at 0, and they don't line up across bars, so the middle pieces are hard to compare by eye.
The number on top of a stacked column is the total: for example, 14,234 animal species on the IUCN Red List in 2019.
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