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 much does NIH spend on opioid research?
  2. How much has the US warmed since 1895?

Chart 1 of 2 · Medical research

How much does NIH spend on opioid research?

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

NIH funded $825 million of opioid research in fiscal 2025. The category began in fiscal 2018, when NIH launched its HEAL Initiative on addiction and pain partway through the year ($317 million); the most in a year was $947 million, in fiscal 2023. These are totals of the projects listed in RePORTER, so they differ somewhat from NIH's published category estimates.

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: NIH RePORTER (National Institutes of Health), Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) (Public domain (U.S. government work)) · Data as of Sep 30, 2025

Open the chart and its numbers

Chart 2 of 2 · Climate

How much has the US warmed since 1895?

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

The contiguous US averaged 54.6°F in 2025. The warmest year since records began in 1895 was 2024, at 55.5°F. Through 2025, the dashed trend line, the straight line that best fits every year, rose about 0.18°F a decade, or 2.3°F since 1895, and warming had sped up to about 0.5°F a decade since 1970. Alaska and Hawaii aren't included.

How to read this chart

Each point is one year's average temperature across the lower 48 states, in degrees Fahrenheit. The axis doesn't start at zero, so a small rise looks steep: read the numbers on the axis, not the height of the line. The dashed line is the trend, the straight line that best fits every year; single years bounce above and below it.

Questions to discuss

  1. Find the warmest and coolest years on the chart. How many degrees apart are they?
  2. Why might one year be much cooler than the year before, even while the trend line keeps rising?
  3. The axis doesn't start at zero here, but bar charts always do. Why is that fair for temperatures but not for bars?

Source: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Climate at a Glance (Public domain (U.S. government work)) · Data as of Dec 31, 2025

Open the chart and its numbers

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