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. How many planets outside our solar system are discovered each year?
  2. What share of people use the internet in each country?

Chart 1 of 2 · Space

How many planets outside our solar system are discovered each year?

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

Astronomers confirmed 246 new planets around other stars in 2025. The first were found in 1992, and the count leaped in 2014 and 2016 (872 and 1,504), when NASA's Kepler team confirmed hundreds of its candidates at once. The archive counts a planet in the year its discovery was published and keeps adding late confirmations, so recent years can still rise.

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: NASA Exoplanet Archive, Planetary Systems Composite Data (Public domain (NASA data); this research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, operated by Caltech under contract with NASA) · Data as of Dec 31, 2025

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Chart 2 of 2 · World

What share of people use the internet in each country?

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

In 2024, 94.7% of people in the United States used the internet and 64.9% in India. The highest share was 100%, and the lowest 8.6%, in Burundi. 182 countries and territories had a 2024 figure. It counts people who used the internet at least once in the previous three months; places without a 2024 figure are left out.

How to read this chart

Each bar is the share of a country's people who used the internet in the previous three months. The dashed line is the whole world. The chart opens on the top and bottom of the ranking; search for a country to find its bar among the rest.

Questions to discuss

  1. Find the United States and one country on another continent. How far apart are their shares?
  2. What do the countries at the bottom of the ranking have in common? What might keep people there offline?
  3. The world figure is closer to the bottom than many rich countries are to the top. Why might that be?

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators: Individuals using the Internet (% of population) (CC BY 4.0 (credit the World Bank)) · Data as of Dec 31, 2024

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