What is an appropriate graphical display for the price of a textbook?

A histogram is an appropriate graphical display for the price of a textbook because it is specifically designed to show the distribution of numerical data. When you have a quantitative variable like price, a histogram allows you to visualize how the various prices are distributed across different ranges or intervals, which helps in understanding patterns such as the central tendency, variability, and potential outliers in the data.

Histograms group the data into bins, making it easier to see frequency distributions. This visual representation can highlight areas where prices are concentrated or reveal the shape of the distribution (e.g., whether it is skewed left, skewed right, or symmetrical), which is valuable information when analyzing costs.

In contrast, other graphical displays such as pie charts and bar charts are better suited for categorical data, where you want to show the proportions of different categories. While bar charts could theoretically represent prices as categories (for example, different textbooks), they do not convey the distribution effectively the way a histogram does. Box plots, while useful for summarizing data and identifying outliers, do not provide as detailed a view of the price distribution across intervals as a histogram does. Thus, the histogram is the most suitable option for representing the prices of textbooks.