HERBET Abel Feb 6, 2014:

Oui pour moi c'est ça, comme je l'explique à Tony.
C'est une échelle interrompue ou une reprise d'échelle pour monter sur l'axe

DLyons Feb 6, 2014:

You'll see examples at
https://www.google.com/search?q=graph "broken scale"&num=100...

claude-andrew Feb 6, 2014:

Agree with Patrick and Tony (see my answer)

Tony M Feb 6, 2014:

@ Patrick Totally agree on that point!

Tony M Feb 6, 2014:

It means... Interrupting one of the axes in order to 'close up' an uninformative gap where there is no relevant data; it may well also involve changing the scale of that axis, so in your example given, the first figur needs to be plotted on a scale that goes in units of, say, 10 — which means that if you stuck to the same scale, 5,600,000,000 would be a LONG way off the right of the page!

So you could break the axis, if you wanted to look at detailed information around both 20 and 5,600,000,000 — but that would make any 'curve' or 'trend' rather meaningless; and keeping the same scale (i.e. units of 10) would be ludicrous for the huge figures.

So the writer is really saying that certain types of data like this really don't lend themselves to graphical respresentation, and so, rather than fudging the graph to the point of making it meaningless, it would be better to simply present the results in table form instead.

Virginie Mair Feb 6, 2014:

Il est question de changement d'échelles: dans un tableau, on peut avoir des nombres aussi petits ou aussi grands que l'on souhaite, cela ne dérange personne. Mais sur un graphique, on ne peut pas "voir" toutes les données à moins d'utiliser deux échelles sur le même graphique (une première pour les "petits" nombres, et une autres pour les "grands"), ce qui est très gênant et difficile à lire.