3.7 Classroom Exercises#

List of exercises and estimated completion times

3a - Saving and Loading Data 5 minutes

3b - Plotting with matplotlib 10 minutes

3c The Biggest Earthquake in the UK This Century 30 minutes

Exercise 3a Saving and Loading Data#

Relevant sections: 3.2.2, 3.2.3

Use YAML or JSON to save your maze data structure to disk and load it again.

The maze would have looked something like this:

house = {
    "living": {
        "exits": {"north": "kitchen", "outside": "garden", "upstairs": "bedroom"},
        "people": ["James"],
        "capacity": 2,
    },
    "kitchen": {"exits": {"south": "living"}, "people": [], "capacity": 1},
    "garden": {"exits": {"inside": "living"}, "people": ["Sue"], "capacity": 3},
    "bedroom": {
        "exits": {"downstairs": "living", "jump": "garden"},
        "people": [],
        "capacity": 1,
    },
}

Exercise 3b Plotting with matplotlib#

Generate two plots, next to each other (on the same row).

The first plot should show sin(x) and cos(x) for the range of x between -1 pi and +1 pi.

Hint: The range(start, stop, step) function only works with integers. Use the arange function from numpy instead: np.arange(start, stop, step).

The second plot should show sin(x), cos(x) and the sum of sin(x) and cos(x) over the same -pi to +pi range. Set suitable limits on the axes and pick colours, markers, or line-styles that will make it easy to differentiate between the curves. Add legends to both axes.

Exercise 3c The Biggest Earthquake in the UK This Century#

GeoJSON is a json-based file format for sharing geographic data. One example dataset is the USGS earthquake data:

import requests

quakes = requests.get(
    "http://earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws/event/1/query.geojson",
    params={
        "starttime": "2000-01-01",
        "maxlatitude": "58.723",
        "minlatitude": "50.008",
        "maxlongitude": "1.67",
        "minlongitude": "-9.756",
        "minmagnitude": "1",
        "endtime": "2021-01-19",
        "orderby": "time-asc",
    },
    timeout=60,
)

quakes.text[0:100]

'{"type":"FeatureCollection","metadata":{"generated":1706020665000,"url":"https://earthquake.usgs.gov'

The Problem#

Determine the location of the largest magnitude earthquake in the UK this century.

You can break this exercise down into several subtasks. You’ll need to:

Load the data#

  • Get the text of the web result

  • Parse the data as JSON

Investigate the data#

  • Understand how the data is structured into dictionaries and lists

    • Where is the magnitude?

    • Where is the place description or coordinates?

Search through the data#

  • Program a search through all the quakes to find the biggest quake

  • Find the place of the biggest quake

Visualise your answer#

  • Form a URL for an online map service at that latitude and longitude: look back at the introductory example

  • Display that image