Is something measured in a percentage a discrete or a continuous variable?

Question

For example if you had done an experiment where you had changed the percentage concentration of washing up liquid in water (0% 5% 10% 15% etc, independent variable) in order to find the area of the space it removes dirt from (dependent variable), would you use a bar chart (used when the independent variable is discrete) or a line graph (used when the independent variable is continuous) to display the results. I'm guessing a line graph but I really don't know, I suppose percentage concentration is continuous because you could in theory have 36.778% but then the highest concentration you can have is 100%.

As you can probably tell, I am confused.

Answer 1

When you perform one of your experiments, you measure a discrete amount of wash liquid and add it to a discrete amount of water. If you choose to express the quantities in percentages for your convenience, so be it. The percent values are discrete.The correct way to present the data is by bar chart. However, since no unusual sudden changes are expected in the results, it would be ok to connect the bars to form a line function to indicate how the results of untested mixes very probably would have been.

Answer 2

Since your percentages vary continuously, the variable sounds continuous. However, you can "discretize" (i.e., approximate the continuous variable by a discrete one) by considering only a finite set of percentages, e.g. the multiples of 5% that you listed.



A continuous variable can be bounded (in your case, it varies continuously from 0% to 100%), there is no contradiction here. (Hope I guessed correctly the source of your confusion.)

Answer 3

1T 2F--the markup is the ratio 3F 4F- always has 2 or less 5-this is actually true since a matrix with the same number of rows as columns is called a square matrix and all square matrices are also rectangular, but a business teacher will prolly say it is false since all rectangular matrices do not necessarily have the same number of rows as columns, business teachers and textbooks are not always logical, and commonly get propositions confused with there converses, or it could be they get the word "called" confused with "definition of ". 6-F 7T 8F 9F 10F 11F 12 I don't know, but prolly True 13F 14T 15T 16F 17F 18F it is called the critical value, or critical point 19F 20 I would have to think to hard for this one, but it would be easy for you to create and example For future reference if you ask 1 question at a time you will get more responses although on a true-false you might ask more than 1 at a time, but no more than 5 or 10 no kiddin

Answer 4

absolutly