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The Graph That Lied

Fiction · 3 min read

Dev was proud of the chart. It had taken him a whole evening to get the colors right.

His uncle ran a small bakery, and for his business studies project Dev had agreed to help him present the year's sales to a possible investor. The numbers were fine. Revenue last year: 412,000. Revenue this year: 428,000. A rise of 16,000, which is a little under four percent. Not a miracle, but not bad.

But a four percent rise looks like nothing on a chart, and Dev wanted his uncle to look good. So he did what he had seen in plenty of news graphics. He started the vertical axis not at zero but at 410,000. Suddenly last year's bar was a stub and this year's towered over it, nine times as tall. He added a bold arrow. He typed BUSINESS BOOMS across the top, and sent the file to his uncle.

His uncle loved it. Dev's older sister Anaya, passing through the kitchen with a bowl of cereal, stopped and read the screen over his shoulder.

"That's a nice chart," she said. "Why does it say the bar for this year is nine times the bar for last year?"

"It doesn't say that."

"It's what it shows. Look at it."

"The numbers are labeled. Anyone can see it's 412 and 428."

Anaya ate a spoonful of cereal. "People look at the shape first, and they read the numbers second, if at all. The numbers are true, but the picture is misleading. The bars aren't in proportion to the sales. Which one do you think wins?"

Dev opened his mouth, then shut it. He knew she was right, which was annoying.

"But sales did go up," he said.

"Sales went up four percent. Your picture says eight hundred percent. Both can't be true at the same time." She put her bowl down. "Try something. Make the axis start at zero."

He did. The two bars were now almost the same height, one just a hair taller. The arrow looked ridiculous. BUSINESS BOOMS looked like a joke.

"Well, that's depressing," he said.

"Is it? It's accurate. If I were an investor, a steady bakery that grew a little might make me trust it more than a boom would."

Dev thought about this. Then he did something that surprised even him. He kept the zero axis, deleted the arrow, and changed the heading to read: Up 3.9% this year, with the best summer yet. He added a second small chart showing the quarters, where the real story was: three weak months in the spring, then the best summer the bakery had ever had. Then he checked every number against the books, twice, because now the chart had to stand up on its own.

His uncle looked at the new version for a long time. "It's less exciting," he said at last.

"It's true," said Dev.

"Hm." His uncle tapped the screen, right on the summer bars. "This part is exciting. People will want to hear about this."

Dev decided that was the best review he had ever got.

Words in this story: revenue, axis, investor, misleading, proportion