Summarizing Frequency of Events According to the \"phenomenon of red shirts\" in

Question

Summarizing Frequency of Events

According to the "phenomenon of red shirts" in the original series of Star Trek, a character wearing a red shirt was more likely to die than a person wearing a different color shirt. The original Star Trek was on the air for three seasons.

During those three seasons, 59 accidents occurred. There are four kinds of shirt: yellow, blue, engineering smock and red.

The frequency of accidents was as follows.

Season 1: 4 yellow, 3 blue, 4 engineering smocks and 6 red

Season 2: 2 yellow, 2 blue, 0 engineering smocks and 11 red

Season 3: 1 yellow, 0 blue, 0 engineering smocks and 26 red

Q Create a frequency table and a histogram to illustrate the data

Explanation / Answer

There are data for each of the three seasons so we should include this in the frequency table and histogram to give all the information.

i) A frequency table is a table giving the number of occurrences of events.

Frequency table showing frequency of accidents, per season of Star Trek episodes in the original series, involving characters wearing different colored shirts

Frequency per season

shirt color 1 2 3 total

yellow 4 2 1 | 7
blue 3 2 0 | 5
engineering smock 4 0 0 | 4
red 6 11 26 | 43

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
total 17 15 27 59   

Looking at this we can see that there are considerably more accidents involving characters wearing red shirts than any other color, and indeed all the other colors put together. We can also see that these accidents in red shirts were mainly in season 3 (26 versus 17 in seasons 1 and 2 put together). Finally, we can also see that there were more accidents in general in season 3 than in seasons 1 and 2, and that these were mainly characters in red shirts. The accidents in season 2 were also mainly of characters in red shirts, but the difference between red and the other colors is less obvious in season 1.

ii) A histogram is a bar chart that graphs the freqency of occurences of events. It is really then a pictorial representation of a frequency table. Since we are interested in the number of accidents per season as well as the total, we can divide the bars pertaining to accidents involving characters wearing a particular color shirt into three sections. This will show the proportions of the frequencies of the 4 colors which may also be of interest.

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