What questions can we ask/answer about these graphics?
Possible questions:
- Were there 10 times as many asylum applications in Sweden as in the UK in 2014?
- Were there 3 times as many application in Germany as in the UK?
- What fraction of the asylum seekers in 2014 came from Syria?
- What fraction of those initially rejected were then accepted on appeal?
It makes sense for the students to look up the population of each of the countries mentioned and then calculate the number who applied for asylum in each country.
Possible answers:
- It depends on the population of each country. This would only be true if the populations are equal. In fact the population of Sweden is a lot smaller than that of the UK. Sweden still had more asylum seekers than the UK, though. (See the table below.)
- The population of the Germany is greater than that of the UK so there were more than three times as many in Germany.
- On the pie chart it looks like about a twelfth. (It is very similar to the angle between two numbers on a clock.) If you do the calculations you get 8%. (NB this was for 2014 - the numbers for 2015 are likely to be higher.)
- About a quarter. A common error here would be to divide the number who were successful on appeal by the number who were rejected, but the denominator should be the sum of those who were rejected eventually and those whose appeal was successful (because they were rejected first time around). The calculation will necessarily be approximate because some of those who were successful on appeal in 2014 might have been on the unsuccessful list from 2013 or earlier.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12115770/The-EUs-back-is-against-the-wall.-It-wont-go-down-without-a-dirty-fight.html
