Introduction To Data

You unconsciously see and use data in your day to day life. In this article, we introduce you to the concept of data and help you identify its importance in our life. Let us consider some examples:

What is Data?

Data is a collection of information gathered by observations, measurements, research or analysis. They may consist of facts, numbers, names, figures or even description of things. Data is organized in the form of graphs, charts or tables. There exist data scientist who does data mining and with the help of that data analyse our world.

You must have watched the weather forecast reports on news channels. They list the minimum temperature, the maximum temperature, rainfall predictions and measurements. The tabular representation is indicated below.

• Say you are given a task to prepare a table that contains the height and weight of all the students in your class. It would look something like this:

You recorded the height and weight of every student and tabulated it. This table can be used to obtain information about individual students and it can also be used for other purposes such as the calculation of average height and weight of your class. Moreover, you can find the tallest and the shortest classmate of yours.

Similarly, you may come across a number of tables and records that provide a lot of information about a person, a group of persons, things, etc.

Classification of Data

Data is classified into

• Qualitative: It describes the quality of something or someone. It is descriptive information. For example, the skin colour, eye colour, hair texture, etc. gives us the qualitative information about a person.
• Quantitative: It provides numerical information. Example, the height and weight of a person.

To learn more about data handling and reporting, download BYJU’S- The Learning App.