Homework 05: Plotting World Development

Total Points: 6

Just one challenge this week. Provide just the R code (.R file) and the figure. See notes below on how to export images.

The World Development Index data (wdi.csv) includes geographic coordinates (longitude, latitude), land area, and income bracket — enough to make a completely different kind of multi-dimensional plot. Follow the instructions below to make a pseudo-map of the countries.

• scatter plot of latitude vs. longitude
• Size points by Area
• Color the points by region
• Make the color transparency proportional to the density: i.e. Population/Area
• Make the shape of the point (e.g. circle, square, triangle … options in ?points) reflect the income bracket.
  
• Label the capitals of the 20 largest countries
• Create a legend labeling the point types / income brackets and region colors
• Make it PRETTY!

An important note: you can export the figure in high quality pdf or png using any one of the following commands:

# you can set your width and height in inches here, default 7x7
pdf("myfigure.pdf", height = 5, width = 8)  
  plot(...)
dev.off()

# the res is dots per square inch ... 300 is publication grade.  Width and height are in pixels
png("myfigure.pdf", res = 300, width = 2000, height = 2000)
  plot(...)
dev.off()