Those in the top 25% of hamburger eating (713) are shown by the top “whisker” and dots. Take the top 50% of the group (1,426) who ate more hamburgers they are represented by everything above the median (the white line). We’ll sort those responses from least to greatest and then graph them with our box-and-whisker. Let’s say we ask 2,852 people (and they miraculously all respond) how many hamburgers they’ve consumed in the past week. In any case, here’s how you read a box plot. It could be that people don’t know about it or maybe are clueless on how to interpret it. The box plot, although very useful, seems to get lost in areas outside of Statistics, but I’m not sure why. Think of the type of data you might use a histogram with, and the box-and-whisker (or box plot, for short) could probably be useful. Tukey, used to show the distribution of a dataset (at a glance). The box-and-whisker plot is an exploratory graphic, created by John W.