How to space out x-ticks on bar graph, and scale y-axis

Question

I have the following code that creates a small dataframe of various countries and a corresponding score value:

import pandas
import numpy 
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
df = pandas.DataFrame(data = ["Norway", "Denmark", "Iceland", 
"Switzerland", "Finland", "Netherlands", "Canada", "New Zealand", 
"Sweden", "Australia"], columns = ["Countries"])
df["Score"] = [7.6, 7.55, 7.50, 7.45, 7.40, 7.35, 7.30, 7.25, 7.20, 
7.15]

I then create a bar graph using matplotlib :

bars = df['Countries']
height = df['Score']
plt.bar(bars, height, align = "center", alpha = 0.5)
plt.ylabel('Happiness Score')
plt.title('Happiness by Country')
plt.show

I am unsure on how to do 2 things: 1) space out the country names of the x-axis so that they are not crossing each other 2) scale the y-axis differently, so that all of the scores don't seem so close to each other

Answer 1

You can simply rotate the labels by some angle of your taste to avoid the overlap. Other way would be to use a widely spaced x-positions for your bars. However, since the country names are long and unequal in length, I wouldn't suggest this.

EDIT: For completeness sake, I am adding Rocky Li's suggestion for the scaling of the y-axis.

plt.xticks(rotation=45)
plt.ylim(7, 8)