What is similar and different between a line plot and a frequency table?

Answer 1

A line plot shows data on a number line with dots or x's to to show frequency. A frequency table is made by arranging collected data values in ascending order of magnitude with their corresponding frequencies. Both will show you the absolute frequency of any given value. And both give you a visual idea of the shape of the frequency and some intuition about outliers and things like that. You can count the number of dots or x on your line plot and create a frequency table. The difference is that one of them already has numbers counted for you. So for small numbers of data, either one will do the same job. But imagine if you have 10000000 points. You really don't want to count them using a line plot. A frequency table will tell you how often each data point occurs. However, if there are lots of values that these points can take on, the frequency table will have too many values to be of much use. The line plot will give us a good visual if there is lots of data, say 1000000 temp measurements, but we only look at the temps between 90-100 and only use integer values.