Mathematical and Technological Literacy I Assignment 4: Absolute and Relative Quantities

1. Read the article "Chicago falls out of 1st in murders" by David Heinzman from the Chicago Tribune, Jan. 1, 2003.  Then answer the following questions in your Word document.

    a.  Does the headline "Chicago falls out of 1st in murders" refer to an absolute quantity or a relative quantity?  In other words, did Chicago fall out of first in absolute terms or in relative terms?  Briefly explain.

    b. In the second paragraph, the author states that "Chicago was way ahead of the pack in the murder rate..."   According to the article, what is the "pack" that Chicago is ahead of?

    c. Let us look more carefully at the complete 2001 data. (This is the data for the year before the article)  Open the file HomicidesForCities2001.xls.  Sort the data by the absolute number of murders.  Which three cities had the highest number of murders in 2001?

    d. In Column D, calculate the homicide rate (homicides per person).  Paste into your Word document the top five rows of the resulting table.

    e.  Now sort the data by column D.  Which three cities had the highest murder rates in 2001?

    f.  How many times greater was the murder rate for the Fairfield, Alabama than the rate for Chicago?

    g.  There were exactly four cities with population greater than 500,000 with a rate higher than Chicago's.  Which were they?

   h.  Now sort by column B (population) in descending order to look at the largest cities in the US.  Copy the top 10 rows of the table and paste them into a different part of your Excel sheet.  You should now have the just the cities with population greater than 1 million.  Sort this table by rate and paste the resulting table into your Word document.  Who is "ahead of the pack" here when we consider cities of population 1 million or greater?

    i. What was the overall impression of the article and the accompanying graph?   Given the additional data in the Excel file, do you think the article is misleading in certain ways? If so, how?  Critique the use of quantitative information in the New Year's Day article.