(click to enlarge image)
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, also referred to as the BP oil spill was an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which flowed for three months in 2010. BP released a video (frame grab above) in which the Vice President talked about BP "ramping up" their oil collection efforts.
Looking at the graph we see a steadily increasing bar graph, at first glance the audience would assume that BP is increasing it's efforts and actually collecting more and more barrels of oil over time, this is not the case. As the graph states, the vertical axis it is the cumulative amount of oil collected. Of course the overall or cumulative oil collected by BP would be increasing over time, the only time it wouldn't be is if they stopped trying to collect up all the leaked oil in which the graph would plateau. In this example we can clearly see that BP has deliberately formatted their results into this bar graph in an order to mislead people.
If the results were put into a line graph the outcome would look a lot less favourable; looking at the bar graph, we can gage the amount of oil actually collected per unit of time by comparing one bar's value with the one that precede's it.
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