Data Story: Sleepy-Deepy

Transcript

Data Story: Sleepy-DeepyThe line graphs below show typical sleep durations of Indians across ages 6 to 75. The second picture is a zoomed-in version of the first picture. Observations We observe a couple of things In line graphs, dots are connected by straight lines. But here these line graphs looks curved because it contains 80 data points that are placed very close to each other. From the graph we can see that the average sleep time for 6-year olds is about 9.5 hours per day. The daily sleep time decreases as we grow through teenage years and step into adulthood, touching about 8 hours a day between ages 30 and 50. After 50, the daily sleep time increases, reaching about 8.5 hours. Now, let’s look one interesting aspect about these graphs - Scale Scale The important lesson here is about scale. The first graph starts its vertical y-axis at 0. This makes the curve look quite flat, making it hard to see the subtle differences in sleep as people age. The second graph zooms in by starting the y-axis at 7.0. Now, the curve is greatly exaggerated! We can clearly see a steep drop in sleep duration from childhood into adulthood. For instance, if we look at the typical sleep duration for someone in their early 30s, the graph shows it dipping quite low, hovering just above the 8-hour mark. It eventually hits its lowest point near age 40 before slowly rising again in the senior years.