Here are some general tips to help you select the main features on bar charts in brief.

1. look at the top

2. look at the bottom
3. can you see an average?
4. are there any exceptions?

1. dont worry about names of countries and types of accommodation.

Think colours and lengths. Look dont read.
2. look at each element one by one. It can be very confusing of you look
at the chart as a whole.
3. look at the extremes (the biggest/the smallest) first they are almost
always important
4. look for patterns these are also important. Note that a pattern can
have exceptions.
5. note exceptions these are also details you want to include.

Table
A solution divide and conquer
My solution is to divide and conquer by looking at the table in columns and
rows. This way you can more easily identify the key details and
comparisons. The key is to understand that you have two sets of data:
1. the data from the rows (across)
2. the data from the columns (down)
Rather than try and understand the table as a whole all at once, look at each
row in turn and each column in turn and note the main features.
What are the main features?
Typically, the main features are
1. high numbers
2. low numbers
3. the biggest contrasts
4. the closest similarities

An example

Looking at this column, we see that we need to include 23 and 3 as the

highest and lowest numbers

Now looking at the rows in turn we note the numbers for manufacturing
are much higher than catering and agriculture.

This table shows how 18-25 year-olds, 25-40 year-olds and 40- 65 years-olds were
employed in nine sectors of the economy. Overall, manufacturing was the most popular
form of employment at an average of around 17% and accountancy and law the least
popular at approximately 3% and 4% respectively. There was only minor variation
 between local government, health, retail and education all of which averaged around
13% and then came agriculture at 7% and catering at 6%.

If we compare the different age groups we see that retail was by far the most common
occupation among 18-25 year-olds at 23%, exactly the same figure
for manufacturing among the oldest age group. By contrast, in the 25-40
group manufacturing and health at 15% were only slightly more common than local
government and education at 12%. It is also notable that there was little or no
difference in the popularity of the legal and accountancy professions across the age
range. The final point to note is that only 9% of the 40-65 year-old group were not
employed in the nine named sectors while this figure was around 20% for the other two
groups.

Look at this table and decide what the major comparisons and contrasts
are . These will be the main points that you need to make in your report.
The tip is to divide and conquer by looking at columns and rows

Looking at the columns and rows I see three major comparisons that must
be included:
1. the younger boys played more sport (the columns)
2. some sports were more popular than others (the rows)
3. the same sports were equally popular in both age groups (the rows
and the columns)

This table shows how age affected the amount of sport boys took part in in the UK in
2010 by comparing boys from 6 to 11 years old with boys from 12 to 16 years old.

It is immediately clear from the table that boys in the younger age group were more
active in sport than their older counterparts. In football, basketball and cricket
this difference was around 10%, whereasonly 2 per cent more of the younger boys
played rugby. The only exception was in swimming where there was no change in the
figures.

If we compare the sports, we can see that there was no difference in

the comparative popularity of the sports between the age groups. In both cases,
football was by far the most popular sport at an average of approximately 82%, with
cricket and basketball coming next at around 40% and 30% respectively. By contrast,
swimming and rugby were the least popular sports at 19% and 22%.

We can draw the conclusion that while age did affect the amount of sport boys played, it
did not notably affect which sports they played