Discrete data is data that can be counted. (You can’t have a half a person).

If your data shows that you have six red cars, seven blue cars and three white cars, you can put six, seven and three on a number line. However, if you were graphing it, the data is car color, therefore it is categorical data. The axis would show blue, red and white, not the numbers. The number would be shown on the vertical axis of a graph.

Continuous data can be assigned an infinite number of values between whole numbers.

Examples