Compare the price change of an item with its base year price. The index number for each year is that year's price as a percentage of its base year price
Shows rate of change (inflation/deflation) of prices of everyday goods, such as mortgage, food and heating. RPI is calculated by comparing prices to the same month of the previous year - this is because there can be seasonal variations
Official measure of inflation used by the UK Government. It's similar to RPI but doesn't include mortgage payments. Pensions and benefits in the UK are updated each year in line with the CPI.
CPI is weighted to reflect the importance of different items in the average shopping basket, and the weightings change each year to reflect consumer spending
Value of goods and services produced in a country in a given amount of time. If the GDP falls in two (or more) successive quarters the economy is in recession
Compare prices from each year with that of the previous year. Show how values change from year to year. The previous year is used as the base year - this means the base year will change every time.
RPI and CPI are chain base index numbers and show how values change monthly or annually.
Represent the whole population. Its a hypothetical population of 1000 people used to represent the whole population, taking into account the number of people with different age/gender/income
To display information from a survey or experiment with two variables. An experiment has two variables if the participants can make two choices during the experiment
They are easy to visualise but aren't always accurate. They use symbols to represent a set frequency of an item, and include a key to show how much of each quantity each symbol represents