CLASS 6 - Mathematics Subject Enrichment Activity-4 Topic: Letter Frequency in a Newspaper Article

Letter Frequency in a Newspaper Article - Mathematics Subject Enrichment Activity

Class: 6  Chapter: Data Handling and Presentation Textbook: NCERT Ganita Prakash
Page No.: 78–79

Topic:

Letter Frequency in a Newspaper Article

Aim:

To analyze a newspaper article by collecting data on the frequency of certain letters, and to arrange the data systematically for interpretation.

Materials Required:

• Newspaper clipping (short article of about 80–100 words)

• Glue stick & scissors

• A4 sheet / Notebook

• Pencil, pen, ruler

Procedure:

1. A small news item was cut from the newspaper and pasted on the sheet.

2. The letters chosen for analysis were c, e, i, r, x and one additional letter: a.

3. The article was carefully read and the number of times each chosen letter appeared was counted.

4. A table was drawn to record the frequencies.

5. From the table, the letters with maximum and minimum frequencies were identified.

6. The letters were arranged in ascending order of frequency.

7. The order was compared with the expected result (x being rare, e being frequent).
   
   

Observation Table:

Fire in historic monument

Charleston, South Carolina - A fire broke out in a historic structure in Charleston, South Carolina early Saturday was contained before causing significant damage.The historic building housed offices of the South Carolina Historical Society. Bendaronnia, a heart of Charleston, was under construction.The fire began at 7:30 a.m. and about 60 firefighters responded to the torn, smoke-filled building, containing the fire in just over an hour. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.Fire Department spokesman Mike Morgan says no one was injured in the blaze.

Letter	c	e	i	r	x	a
Number of times found	20	49	47	36	0	41

Reflections / Conclusion:

a) The letter found the most number of times is: e (49 times)
b) The letter found the least number of times is: x (0 times)
c) Ascending order of frequency: x (0), c (20), r (36), i (47), e (49), a (41)

Comparison with classmates’ order:
Most of the classmates also got a similar order: ‘x’ was least, ‘e’ was most.
The small differences were due to the article chosen but the general pattern remained the same.

Reason:

• Letters like e, a, i, r occur very frequently in English words.
  
  

• Rare letters like x, q, z occur very seldom.
  
  

• This shows the natural frequency distribution of letters in the English language.

Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTs):

1. If another article of the same length is chosen, will the order remain the same? Why/Why not?
   → Yes, mostly. The relative order will remain nearly the same because English has fixed patterns of letter usage (e.g., ‘e’ is always most frequent, ‘x’ very rare). Small variations may occur due to the type of article (sports, politics, science, etc.).
   
   

2. Why do you think vowels like ‘e’ and ‘a’ appear so often in English?
   → Because they are required to form syllables in almost all words. Most words cannot be made without vowels. Among vowels, ‘e’ is the most flexible and appears in thousands of common words.
   
   

3. How can this data be represented visually?
   → By drawing a bar graph with letters on the X-axis and frequency on the Y-axis. This will make comparison clearer.
   
   

4. If you had to analyze the frequency of words instead of letters, what would change in your process?
   → Instead of counting letters, we would count words and see which word repeats the most. For example, words like “the” or “is” would appear more often.
   
   

5. How is this activity useful in real life?
   →
   
   

• Helps in coding and encryption (letter frequency analysis is used in cryptography).
  
  

• Useful for designing keyboards and predictive text tools.
  
  

6. Improves data collection and interpretation skills. QUESTION FROM TEXTBOOK Take a blank piece of paper and paste any small news item from a newspaperEach student may use a different articleNow , prepare a table on the piece of paper as given belowCount the number of each of the letters ‘c’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘r’, and ‘x’ in the words of the news article, and fill in the table. LETTER c e i r x Any other letter of your choice: Number of times found in the news item a The letter found the most number of times is ______ b The letter found the least number of times is _________ c List the five letters ‘c’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘r’, ‘x’ in ascending order of frequency Now , compare the order of your list with that of your classmates Is your order the same or nearly the same as theirs? ( most everyone is lik ely to get the order ‘x, c, r, i, e’ Why do you think this is the case?

d Write the process you followed to complete this task d. Process followed:
        1. Selected a short newspaper article.         2. Copied the text onto paper.         3. Counted the given letters one by one.         4. Recorded frequencies in a table.         5. Analyzed which letters occurred most/least. e Discuss with your friends the processes they followed e. Discussion with friends: Some may scan line by line. Others may tally letter counts directly while reading aloud. A few might use highlighting/underlining for each letter. f If you do this task with another news item, what process would you follow? f. If doing with another news item: I would follow the same process: choose a small article, underline target letters, make tallies, prepare table, and analyze results.