Data Sheet - Countries of the Western Hemisphere

This segment of the project began by looking at the statistics page in our social studies book.  There was a one half inch pie graph shown.  Students were asked to copy the angles of the pie graph on to the center of a piece of paper.  They used a compass to create a five inch circle keeping the point of the compass on the point where the vertices met.  They extended the rays to the circumference of the new circle.  This helped them to understand the concept that a ray has a starting point and continues forever as well as working with the other geometric concepts.

Once they had a pie graph drawn, they used a protractor to identify the degrees for each angle.  They knew that every circle contains 360 degrees, so they could check their calculations by adding the degrees measured and making sure that they added to 360.

The next step was to make a conversion from degrees to percent.  They divided the degrees measured for each angle by 360 to find the percent of the whole.  They could check these calculations since they know that the percents of the three angles would add up to 100%.

After doing this by hand, and displaying their work, they input their data into the spreadsheet. Formulas were used to total the numbers of degrees to equal 360 degrees and numbers of percents to total 100%.  Students were quite impressed to see how the computer could do all of the adding by adding a simple formula.  They were also surprised to see how easy it is to create a pie graph from the data in the spread sheet.
 

	Degrees	Measured	on  Pie	Graph	Degrees	Converted	to	Percents
	Agriculture	Industry	Services	Total	Agriculture	Industry	Services	Total
Argentina	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Brazil	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Colombia	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Costa Rica	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Cuba	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Dominican Republic	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Mexico	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Panama	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Peru	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Uruguay	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Venezuela	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.

The above table represents a spread sheet that was prepared to show the relative percentage of the economy of each country that was derived from agriculture, industry, and services.
 

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