"Read All About It".

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Mathematics Coursework:- Read All About It

Introduction

I have chosen the "Read All About It" option for my Maths Coursework. This involves comparing articles from newspapers and comparing them. I have chosen to use two newspapers for my investigation. I have chosen to compare articles from a Tabloid and a Broadsheet newspapers. The papers I have chosen are "The Mirror" and "The Guardian".

I am predicting that the articles in the broadsheet newspapers would be more complex and often longer. I would also have thought that broadsheets have a higher reading age. I view the broadsheets as a newspaper for more intelligent readers and for people looking for in depth reading, whereas I think that tabloid readers will be less advanced readers and be people that want a lighter read. It will be interesting to see how accurate my prediction is.

I will be looking at:

* Average Word Length

* Average Sentence Length

* Reading age

There are many different newspapers; they range from tabloid papers to the broadsheet papers. The tabloids are a lighter read to the more involving descriptive broadsheet papers. Different newspapers are written to suit these preferences.

In the tabloid papers the wording used is less profound and therefore more easily understood. However in broadsheet newspapers the writing is more complicated and difficult to read.

Analysis 1

Investigation into the word lengths of two different samples of writing from two different types of newspaper.

Hypothesis: My hypothesis is that a sample of two hundred words from a broadsheet newspaper will consist of more longer words than a sample of two hundred words from a tabloid newspaper. I also think that the most popular word length will be 4 letters long in both papers.

Method: I will select two pieces of writing consisting of two hundred words each from two different newspapers , of which one will be a tabloid and the other will be a broadsheet. The topic of each of the samples will be the same, e.g. The Olympics. I will do this so that the two pieces of information will be comparable. By selecting two hundred words from each article, I will have a big enough sample to give me enough information to interpret some good results; yet it is small enough to be easy to gather and sort. I shall ignore proper nouns, e.g. names of people and places, and also numbers. I shall leave these out as they are not everyday words and could introduce bias into my investigation and results, e.g. in one article, the name of someone may be 'Tim Smith', and in another article, the name of someone may be 'Alfredo Schevschenko'. As one name is much longer than the other this would be skew the results.

Handling the data: I shall firstly record how many words there are of each word length, I will do this in a tally-table. I will then work out the median, the mode and the range. After this I will interpret my results into frequency polygons so that the results are easy to visualise trends. I will then compare the results of the tabloid investigation with the results of the broadsheet investigation. I will then calculate the mean and then further analyze the data using box plots, standard deviation and variance from the mean.

Results: Word length in a broadsheet newspaper.

Tally-table to record raw data.

Word Length

Tallies

Frequency

IIIII I

6

2

IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII

30

3

IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIII

39

4

IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII I

36

5

IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII III

23

6

IIIII IIIII II

2

7

IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII II

27

8

IIIII IIIII II

2

9

III

3

0

I

1

IIIII III

8

2

II

2

3

0

4

I

5

0

Totals

200

200

Median - the median word length is four letters long.
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Mode - the modal word length is three letters.

Range - the range is thirteen. One to fourteen (1 to 14). 14 - 1= 13

Mean -

Formulae

Total no. of letters = Mean

Total no. of words

962 = 4.81

200

Mean word length in the broadsheet sample was 4.81 letters long.

Quartiles and interquartile range -

Finding the median and upper and lower quartiles.

,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,LQ,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,M,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,UQ,8,8,8,8,8,9,9,9,10,11,11,11,11,11,11,11,11,12,12,14.

LQ - Lower quartile LQ = 3

M - Median M = 4

UQ ...

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