PART II Descriptive Statistics3 The Histogram Growncups love figures. When you tll them that you have made a new frend, they fever sh you at questions abot essential matters, They never sa) 10 You, “What ‘does his voice sound lke? What games dors he love best? Does he colect buries?” Instead, ey demend: "How old ts he? How reany brothers has he? How much does Ihe weigh? How mach money does his father make?” Only from these figures do they ‘thik they have learned anything about him the Lite Prince! 1. INTRODUCTION In the United States, how are incomes distributed? How much worse off are minority groups? Some information is provided by government statistics, ob- tained from the Current Population Survey. The mechanics of this survey will be discussed in part VI; each month, the survey provides a representative cross section of about 50,000 American families. In March, these families are asked t0 report their incomes for the previous year. We are going to look atthe results for 1973. Of course, these data have to be summarized somehow. Nobody wants to Took at 50,000 numbers. To summarize data, statisticians often use a graph called 1 histogram. ‘The histogram forthe income data is shown in figure 1 on the next page. ‘This section explains how to read histograms. Fist ofall, there is no verti- cal scale; unlike most ather graphs, a histogram docs not need a vertical scale. ‘The next thing to look at isthe horizontal scale. This shows income in thousands