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Where Are You Flying?

Age 14 to 18
Challenge Level Yellow star
  • Problem
  • Student Solutions
  • Teachers' Resources

Where do people fly to from London?


We collected data on the number of planes that flew to each continent from London airports in 2017.
Here are four representations of this data:




Figure 1





Figure 2: Popularity of destinations (by continent) in 2017




Figure 3: Destinations of flights from London in 2017





Figure 4: Number of flights from London airports in 2017

  • What information can you deduce from each representation?
  • What is good about each representation (including its caption)?
  • What is bad about each representation?
  • Who might create each of these representations and for what purpose?
  • Could you create a better representation?

To see the original data used to create these representations, click on "Show".

Continent Total flights Proportion
Europe 374496 67.8%
Domestic 57866 10.5%
Asia 52336 9.5%
North America 52259 9.5%
Africa 11925 2.2%
South America 2059 0.4%
Oceania 1442 0.3%

  • Is there anything you might ask about this data?

To find out how this data was collected, take a look at the article Challenging Data Tasks: The Making of "Where Are You Flying?"


This resource is part of the collection Statistics - Maths of Real Life

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The NRICH Project aims to enrich the mathematical experiences of all learners. To support this aim, members of the NRICH team work in a wide range of capacities, including providing professional development for teachers wishing to embed rich mathematical tasks into everyday classroom practice.

NRICH is part of the family of activities in the Millennium Mathematics Project.

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