For my Coursework I have been asked to come up with three or more different methods of analyzing data from newspaper, and to incorporate evaluations, analysis, graphs to prove a hypothesis of my choice.

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Maths investigation into Newspapers

For my Coursework I have been asked to come up with three or more different methods of analyzing data from newspaper, and to incorporate evaluations, analysis, graphs to prove a hypothesis of my choice.

For each investigation I will firstly write out my hypothesis with a logical explanation as to why I chose it. Then I will collect my results and present them in a table. I will then analyze my results, create a graph suitable to the investigation at hand, and form some sort of conclusion from both table and graph, should my hypothesis be wrong, I will then try to work out why and explain why it was wrong.

For my first investigation I will study the length of a hundred words in two different newspapers, one broad-sheet (The Times), one tabloid (The Mirror) both with a political theme. I chose to use 100 words, because that would give me a fair number of words to deal with, it is a round number

Hypothesis No#1

I predict, due to a recent survey that The Times has a higher range on adult readers, that the Times on average will have a larger word length than the mirror will, this is because adults have a larger vocabulary of longer words than younger groups of readers.

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Compiled in lesson                        Numbers of Letters per word

 

However, it appeared that my hypothesis was incorrect, and that both newspapers had a pretty equal word length as the table shows. This makes this set of results unreliable as a source of the differences between the newspapers.

Although the graph on the previous page displays very little for analysis purposes, it does show by looking at it that my hypothesis was incorrect. And although toward the 9, 10 and 11 letters mark The Times ...

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