Chart assignment

Charts to read and discuss

Read each chart, then answer its questions. Every chart shows its source and date; open it for a table of the numbers and the data to download.

  1. What share of clinical trials do companies run?
  2. What is the unemployment rate in each country?

Chart 1 of 2 · Clinical trials

What share of clinical trials do companies run?

The interactive chart needs JavaScript. The numbers are on the chart's page.

Companies led 19% of the clinical trials that started in 2025, against a high of 39.0% in 2002. Universities, hospitals and nonprofits lead almost all the rest. The 2000 figure is low partly because few trials were registered before 2005, when medical journals began requiring it.

Questions to discuss

  1. In one sentence of your own, what does this chart show?
  2. Find the biggest change or difference in the chart. What might explain it?
  3. Who collected these numbers, and how recent are they? What else would you want to know before drawing a conclusion?

Source: ClinicalTrials.gov (U.S. National Library of Medicine), counted with its API v2 (Public domain (U.S. government work); source National Library of Medicine) · Data as of Nov 4, 2026

Open the chart and its numbers

Chart 2 of 2 · World

What is the unemployment rate in each country?

The interactive chart needs JavaScript. The numbers are on the chart's page.

In 2025, 4.2% of workers in the United States were unemployed, against 4.8% worldwide; the highest rate was 34.2% in Eswatini, and the lowest 0.1%, in Qatar. Search 182 countries and territories. These are the International Labour Organization's estimates, which count people without work who are looking for it and fill gaps where a country runs no regular survey, so they can differ from a country's own figures.

How to read this chart

Each bar is the share of a country's workers who have no job and are looking for one, estimated by the International Labour Organization. The dashed line is the world. People who aren't looking for work, such as students and retirees, aren't counted as unemployed at all.

Questions to discuss

  1. Is the United States above or below the world rate, and by about how many percentage points?
  2. A country can have low unemployment while many people earn very little. How is that possible?
  3. Why would someone who has given up looking for work not count as unemployed? Does that make the number more or less useful?

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