At a marketing meeting in Samarkand, a young designer showed a slide that made the whole room smile. Two bars compared the company's sales of green tea in two years. The bar for this year was twice as tall as the bar for last year. "We doubled our sales," someone said.
The finance manager, Ulugʻbek, asked to see the numbers. Last year's sales were 110 thousand packs; this year's were 120 thousand. The increase was 10 thousand packs, which is about 9 percent, not one hundred percent.
The secret was in the left edge of the chart. The axis starts at 100, not at zero. On such a chart the first bar shows only the 10 packs above 100, and the second shows the 20 above 100, so the second bar looks twice as tall even though the real numbers are close.
Ulugʻbek did not blame the designer. Charting software often chooses the starting point automatically, to fill the space. But he asked that every chart shown to investors follow two rules: bars start at zero, and the number is written on top of every bar.
The redrawn chart was less exciting. The two bars looked almost the same height, which was the truth. Next to them, the designer wrote the actual change: up 10 thousand packs, about 9 percent.
Ulugʻbek told the team why this mattered. A reader who trusts the height of a bar can be misled by a single setting; a reader who reads the axis and the numbers cannot. The GMAT, he added, tests exactly that habit: read the axis first, then the numbers, and only then the shapes.
The real achievement, nine percent growth in a crowded market, was still worth celebrating. It simply had to be celebrated honestly.