How to Lie with Statistics – that illusive 0.1%

Cut out the following from a newspaper ad for a company IPO.

8% is a great yield by current standards but I just loved how the bar chart showed such an impressive growth from 7.9% to 8.0%. If the chart was drawn proportionately, the bars would have to be really really long. Just for the fun of it, I imported the picture into GSP, shrunk it by some factor and measured the height of that 0.1% which was approximately 0.39 cm. This means that the 8.0% bar should be a whopping 31.5cm long. I then constructed a bar of that length. The overall picture is then shrank again to fit into an A4 page.