Level 5-6 Data Handling - Pie Charts

In KS3 Maths you'll do a lot of work on data handling. One part of data handling is representing the information you have in the form of graphs, tables or charts. This quiz looks in detail at one of these methods - pie charts.

A pie chart is a good way to illustrate how a data set is distributed over its different categories. Each category is represented by a 'slice' of the pie and the bigger the 'slice' the more important that category is. Imagine that you ask 100 people to name their favourite film genre. 50 say comedy but only 5 say romance. Comedy would take up one half of your pie chart whilst romance would only be one tenth. The hard part comes in converting these fractions into degrees.

Like all circles, pie charts contain 360^o. That means that every 1% takes up 3.6^o. In our example, comedy would take up 180^o on the pie chart and romance would be 36^o. It's quite simple once you've got the hang of it. Try this quiz to see how well you understand pie charts.