GED and HiSET social studies — reading charts, tables and maps

A good share of the social studies test is not about history or government at all. It is about a table, a chart or a map, and one question: what do these figures actually show? The GED names this part of the test directly, as using numbers and graphs in social studies, and the HiSET asks candidates to analyze and evaluate information across every social studies field, which in practice means reading data as often as reading prose.

This material trains that skill on its own. Each question describes a figure in words, with every value you need written into the question: licenses issued in four towns, solar panel output by year, a household budget in percentages, a county's population in two census years, disease cases in two states of very different size, voter turnout by age group, a map legend in five income bands, a map scale.

The questions are built around the mistakes that cost points. The most common one is choosing a statement that may well be true in the world but is not shown by these particular figures, so several items put exactly that kind of sentence among the options. Others separate ideas that are easy to blur: a count against a rate per 100,000 people, a rise of 2 percentage points against a rise of 50 percent, the mean against the median when one household earns ten times the others, two things rising together against one causing the other, and what a thematic map shows (where a value is high or low) against what it does not (why, or how it is changing). Two items are straight calculations, a percent change and a real distance from a map scale, with the working shown in every explanation.

The flashcards cover the vocabulary the questions rely on: rate, per capita, percent change, percentage point, mean, median, correlation, causation, legend, scale, trend, axis, proportion and thematic map.

The written work gives eight longer tasks with the data printed in the question: computing and comparing rates, choosing between mean and median and saying why, turning a turnout change into both percentage points and percent, spotting a third factor behind a correlation, matching three data sets to the right kind of graph, reading a two-year table, planning a route from a map scale, and separating what a rent graph shows from a claim about why rents rose.

The oral exam asks you to explain your reasoning aloud, one question at a time, the way you would need to reason on the day.

There are no images here, while the real tests show charts and maps on screen; the free practice tests published for both exams are the place to practice reading the pictures themselves. Zestly is an independent study tool, not affiliated with GED Testing Service or the HiSET program.

• Decide whether a statement is shown by a set of figures or only possibly true in the world
• Compute a percent change and a rate per 100,000 people, and compare places of different size fairly
• Tell a change in percentage points from a percent change
• Choose between the mean and the median when one value is extreme
• Explain why a correlation between two variables does not show that one causes the other
• Read a thematic map's legend and a map scale, and pick the right kind of graph for a data set

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the published descriptions of the GED Social Studies test (the topic Using Numbers and Graphs in Social Studies) and the HiSET Social Studies subtest. All figures are invented for practice.