GED and HiSET language arts — reading text with tables and charts

Workplace and public documents rarely come as plain text. A memo arrives with a chart, a report with a table, a bill with a column of numbers, and the writer draws a conclusion from them. The HiSET Language Arts – Reading framework names this directly: interpret information presented in different formats, such as charts, graphs and tables, and apply it to understanding the text. The GED Reasoning Through Language Arts test also uses informational texts that come with data.

The skill is not arithmetic for its own sake. It is checking a writer's words against the numbers: does the chart support what the memo says, does the table answer the question the letter raises, and where does the writer's conclusion go further than the data can carry?

This material uses five adult documents, each with the data printed in the question or drawn in a chart. A family clinic's practice manager plans reminder texts after a quarter of missed appointments, shown by weekday in a bar chart. A food bank director asks for delivery volunteers, with a pie chart of how 12,400 volunteer hours were spent. A utility answers a customer's complaint about summer bills with four months of usage and charges. A council member reads a commuting survey of 800 downtown workers as a case for a parking garage. A community college calls its biggest job-training program its most successful.

The twelve questions ask which statement a chart supports, which goes beyond it, and how a graphic relates to the claim beside it. They also include the short calculations that settle such questions: a cost from a count and a unit price, a percent of a total, a price per kilowatt-hour, a share of those enrolled. Every explanation shows the arithmetic, and the wrong options are the numbers you get from the usual slips, such as taking one bar instead of two, the wrong slice, or raw counts instead of rates.

The flashcards cover the vocabulary: table, bar chart, pie chart, axis label, category, percent of a total, rate, trend, a claim supported by data, overgeneralization, and the difference between describing data and drawing a conclusion from it.

The written work gives you new documents, among them a store's sales table, an overtime report and a rent-increase notice, and asks you to state what the data show, calculate a rate or a share, find the claim that goes too far, and write a sentence the data do support. The oral exam puts a short claim and a few numbers in front of you and asks what the numbers support and what they do not.

Zestly is an independent study tool, not affiliated with GED Testing Service or the HiSET program, and no score is promised.

• Decide which statement in a text a chart or table actually supports
• Recognize a conclusion that goes beyond what the data show
• Calculate a total cost, a percent of a total, a rate per unit or a share from a table or chart
• Explain how a graphic relates to the claim beside it
• Compare groups by rates rather than raw counts

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the HiSET Language Arts – Reading process category B4 (interpret information presented in different formats such as charts, graphs and tables and apply it to understanding the text; HiSET Test at a Glance) and the GED Reasoning Through Language Arts reading topics. All documents and figures are original.