Sorting Information
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Video
Alphabetic Ordering
Placing names in alphabetic order requires sorting names according to the conventional order of letters in the alphabet. Each xth letter is compared with the xth letter of other words in a list starting at the first letter of each word and advancing to the second, third, etc.
The list dovetail, manager, apple, dragon, animal and music would be placed in the following order:
animal, apple, dovetail, dragon, manager and music
This is done because A comes before D which comes before M. After the first letter of each word is sorted out, the second letter is looked at. N comes before P, Ocomes before R and A comes before R.
Names
With names, alphabetic ordering is done based on the last name of an individual. The following people are placed in the correct alphabetic order:
Sean Bean, Michael Fox, Jeffery Michaels and Andrew Yang.
The last names determine the order of the list (Bean, Fox, Michaels, and Yang).
When two people share the same last name, the order is then based upon the first name. The following people: Jeff Stevens, Steven McCaffery and Trevor Stevens would be placed in the following order:
Steven McCaffery, Jeff Stevens, Trevor Stevens.
The order of the two “Stevens” is based on the first names Jeff and Steven.
Titles
Titles are not considered in sorting until after the names have been sorted. For example:
Richard Allan III would come before Victor Allan II and
John Michael Jr. would come before Sean Michael.
Shorter Words
When attempting to sort names in an alphabetized list when one word is shorter than the other, yet they have the same configuration of letters up until that point, the shorter word would fall first in the order.
John Smithers, Michael Smith and Andrew Smitherson would be placed in the following order:
Michael Smith, John Smithers and Andrew Smitherson.
Dates
Dates are sorted by year followed by month and finally day. The following dates are placed in order from earliest to latest.
Sample 1:
2001, June 12
2004, April 16
2005, December 8
Sample 2:
03/03/1975
13/10/1977
01/11/1977
It is usually safe to assume that the order is day/month/year unless there is a signal that month is placed first as in the following sample.
Sample 3:
05/15/1981
07/08/1981
09/09/1983
Numbers
When sorting numbers in order, it is important to understand the proper place value of digits. Review the teaching material in the math section if necessary. The further a digit is to the left of any number, the larger it is. For example:
100 > 10 > 1 > 0.1 > 0.01 > 0.001
Only compare digits if they share the same place value as the other digits. For example:
32 > 9 (compare 3 and 0)
0.1 > 0.0999 (compare 1 and 0)
3.2 > 3.1 (because 3 and 3 are equal, compare 2 and 1)
6.03 > 6.009 (because 6 and 6 are equal compare 3 and 0)