Read all about it coursework

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Introduction:


I am going to do my second piece of coursework in maths called 'Read all about it'. This coursework requires me to gather data from two printed sources. These two printed sources would be a magazine and a newspaper. I will compare the features of a magazine to the features of a newspaper. I am going to try and prove that one has a longer average word length than the other.
I am going to use “IN Baku” magazine and “The Baku Post” newspaper as these are the most readable printed sources in Azerbaijan.


Hypothesis:

My hypothesis is that word lengths in a magazine will be the same on average that word lengths in a newspaper.Further I am going to give one more hypothesis about sentences length in the magazine and the newspaper.

Plan:

  1. I am going to buy “IN Baku” magazine and “The Baku Post” newspaper.
  2.  I will select 2 articles, 1 from the magazine and 1 from the newspaper.
  3. I will be comparing 2 articles on the same topic.
  4. In each article I will randomly select 100 words. By selecting one hundred words from each article, I will have a good 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.
  5. I shall firstly record how many letters there are in each word.
  6. I will first present it in order as it is in the book and then classify the data into a tally-table.
  7. I will then work out the median, the mode, the mean and the range.
  8. After this I will interpret my results into frequency diagram so that it would be easy to visualise trends.
  9. I will then compare the results of the magazine investigation with the results of the newspaper investigation.
  10. I will then calculate the mean and then further analyze the data using box
    plots.

Name of magazine:

IN Baku.

Name of article:

Triathlon triumphs!

This is the data that I have:

2        3        6        6        2        6        8        2        4        3        

3        5        2        3        3        4        7        4        3        5        

6        3        3        9        3        9        8        7        4        10

7        3        4        3        6        3        4        3        3        3        

6        4        9        9        2        4        7        4        4        3        

8        5        2        3        9        6        6        2        9        6        

Join now!

10        3        4        10        2        1        8        5        2        3        

5        5        2        3        3        3        4        1        7        3        

7        5        2        9        2        3        3        3        5        3        

2        10        7        4        12        4        2        3        3        5

I have highlighted the numbers with different colours for ease of counting. Now I am going to classify data in a tally chart.

Median - Half of 100 is 50, so the median will correspond to 50th value in order. So the median word length is 3 letters long.

Mode – the modal word length is three letters.

Range – the range is eleven. One to twelve (12 – 1 = 11).

Mean –

Formaulae        

Mean word length in the magazine sample was 0,78 letters long.

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